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CHRISTIANITY BETWEEN 
SUNDAYS. 


Classbook of Old Testament History 

Everyman’s Religion 

Christianity Between Sundays 

The Heresy of Cain 

The Battles of Peace 

The Human Nature of the Saints 

The Path of Life 

In This Present World 

The Year of Grace (2 Vols.) 


The Cross and Passion 
Faith and Social Service 



CHRISTIANITY 

BETWEEN SUNDAYS 


BY 

GEORGE HODGES, 

DEAN OF THE EPISCOPAL THEOLOGICAL 
SCHOOL, CAMBRIDGE, MASS. 


NEW REVISED EDITION 



Nefo fgflrk 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1914 


All rights reserved 



Copyright, 1892, 

By The Macmillan Company. 

SIXTH EDITION. 



Norfoooh $ress: 

Berwick & Smith Co., Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 


DEDICATION. 


Isaiah’s wife is called the “ prophetess/’ perhaps 
because she helped him with his sermons. 
No doubt but she gave him her inspiring 
sympathy and her wise advice. 

Some of the critics, who are so much interested 
in making out that nearly every chapter in 
the Old Testament was written by two or 
three different people, may some day dis- 
cover for us how many good things in Isaiah’s 
sermons are due to the suggestions of his 
wife. 

The best of this book belongs to my wife, to 
whom I most lovingly dedicate it. 


Calvary Church Rectory, 
Pittsburg, 1892. 




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CONTENTS 


PAG* 

The Credentials of Christianity 1 

Business on Christian Principles 17 

The Dry Brook 50 

The Beginning of the Millennium 61 

The Holiness of Holidays 70 

Money for Men 83 

What a Blind Man Saw 92 

The Brethren and the Brotherhood 102 

The Simplicity of Religion 113 

Four Ways of Loving God 124 

The Interview with Nicodemus 137 

Religion on Business Principles 151 

The Border of His Garment 161 

The Great Commandment 173 

Peter and Judas 185 

Serving God for Naught 197 

Two Stumbling-stones 208 

Why We Ought to Love God 219 

The Sick of the Palsy 230 

The Consolation of Religion 242 

The Proving of Philip 254 



THE CREDENTIALS OF CHRISTIANITY. 


u The blind receive their sight, and the lame 
walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, 
the dead are raised np, and the poor have the 
gospel preached to them.” 

Jesns, when he said that, stood face to face 
with two of the worst miseries of humanity — mis- 
ery of mind and misery of body. On the one 
hand was a group of men who had asked a ques- 
tion. “Art thou he that should come,” they 
wanted to know, “ or do we look for another ? ” 
You see how that question touches the heart of 
Christianity. The supreme fact that differences 
Christianity from all the other religions of his- 
tory is the fact of the life and character of Jesus. 
The essential assertion of Christianity is the as- 
sertion that Jesus of Nazareth is indeed he that 
should come, and that we need look for no other. 
That question set a doubt upon the central article 
of the Christian creed. These men were un- 
believers. 


2 THE CREDENTIALS OF CHRISTIANITY. 

On the other hand was a considerable com- 
pany of people, some blind, some lame, some 
lepers, some deaf, some mourning the dead, and 
all of them, probably, poor. These people repre- 
sented pain and poverty. 

We have no greater problems in the world to- 
day than the problem of doubt and the problem 
of poverty. These two great questions, like the 
enigma of the Sphinx, demand solution. And we 
must somehow answer them, or pay the fearful 
penalty. Doubt threatens the Church, poverty 
threatens the State. Jesus Christ stood face to 
face with both these problems, and answered them 
in the words that I have quoted. 

The unbelief, in this instance, came from John 
the Baptist. These doubters were messengers of 
his, and that great question was his question. 
Even the forerunner had fallen from the faith. 

Much of this unbelief of John’s was due, no 
doubt, to physical conditions. J ohn was in prison. 
He was shut up in a black fortress of Herod’s, 
over in Moab, on the borders of the Dead Sea. 
That imprisonment itself, John felt naturally 
enough, meant the real end of all his work. 
Those great walls which shut out the sun and the 
sky stood straight across the path of the prophet’s 
future. Thus far was he to go, and no farther. 
Jesus was to increase, and he was to decrease — 


THE CREDENTIALS OF CHRISTIANITY. 


3 


John had already accepted that. But this meant 
failure. It seemed, no doubt, to John, as it 
seemed in the old days to Elijah, that his life had 
been in vain. And he wondered, perhaps, if it 
had not been a tragic mistake even from the 
beginning. Had he, after all, been the forerun- 
ner of the Messiah ? This man of Nazareth, was 
he really the Holy One of Israel? Was he the 
Christ, or do we look for another ? 

And all that depression was deepened by John’s 
bodily weakness. No man resorted to that frown- 
ing prison for his health. Whoever was shut up 
in one of those damp cells lost more than liberty ; 
he lost health with it. The chances are that John 
was sick. That was the beginning of it. His 
body was out of order, and that set his mind out 
of order. First disease, then depression, and then 
doubt. 

Almost everybody knows how that is. A 
great deal of unbelief is not the real voice of the 
man. We are greatly troubled ; we are in a mor- 
bid and weak condition of body, and we seem to 
be getting every day farther away from God ; the 
sky gets black over our head, prayer becomes 
only a formality, and faith seems to be dying. 
But the real trouble is that we are not ourselves. 
We are like one of those blind people who stood 
that day by the side of Jesus, and could not see 


4 THE CREDENTIALS OF CHRISTIANITY. 

his face. He was there, and God’s beautifm 
bright world was there also, but these men were 
blind. Pretty soon they got better, and saw 
clearly. 

What we need when we fall into this kind of 
unbelief is not the parson, but the doctor. It is 
not theology that we need, but medicine. The 
best plan is to realize the conditions j to recog- 
nize the fact that even the spirit, in this life, de- 
pends upon the body, and that what is really the 
matter with us is not lack of faith, but lack of 
health j and so to use the right remedies, if we 
can find them, and to go out into the pure air, 
and to regain our strength. We will find that 
strength of faith will return with it. 

Some of this unbelief of John’s, however, may 
have been due not so much to depression as to 
disappointment. John the Baptist was a man 
whose life was devoted to one single purpose. 
His business was to prepare the way for the 
Messiah. That great ideal hero and deliverer, 
toward whose coming the hopes of the Hebrew 
people had been turned for centuries, had at last 
come. And it was appointed to John to find him 
and make him known. Naturally, during those 
years that he had spent solitary in the desert, he 
had meditated on the character and work of the 
Messiah day after day. He had elaborated his 


THE CREDENTIALS OF CHRISTIANITY. 5 

ideal of the Christ. He had made up his mind 
what sort of being he would be. And then when 
the real Christ was set beside this ideal Christ of 
John’s, John may have been disappointed. Some- 
how Jesus of Nazareth disappointed almost ev- 
erybody’s preconceived idea. The whole Jewish 
nation was anticipating quite another character 
of Christ. They were grievously disappointed, 
so much so that they rejected Jesus altogether. 
But it is quite possible that nobody was more 
disappointed than John the Baptist. 

For our ideals are little more than our own 
selves mirrored, and bettered, and magnified. 
The ideal Messiah, as John had imagined him, 
was a great, emphasized, bettered, and perfected 
John. John the Baptist, to take only one illus- 
tration, was pre-eminently the teacher of repent- 
ance. The fact in human life on which he dwelt 
was the fearful fact of sin. He urged all men to 
instant decision for or against God. And to 
quicken that decision he preached the dreadful 
penalties of sin, taught the wrath of the righteous 
God, and pictured the agonies of hell. If he 
could have had his way, he would have turned the 
whole world into a great universal revival meet- 
ing. And when Jesus came, speaking quietly 
and gently, not making any great stir in society, 
preaching the gospel of growth, teaching the love 


6 


THE CREDENTIALS OF CHRISTIANITY. 


of God, and emphasizing the fatherhood of God 
rather than the judgeship of God, John was dis- 
appointed. Could it be possible that Jesus of 
Nazareth was really the Messiah for whose com- 
ing he had been sent to prepare the way ? The 
question turned itself over and over in his mind 
there in the solitude of his prison : “Art thou he 
that should come, or do we look for another ? ” 

Or perhaps John was like Judas, and was in a 
hurry, wanted the kingdom of God to come right 
off, looked every day for some sudden spectacular 
manifestation of the Messiahship of Jesus, and 
looked vainly, and so from disappointment passed 
to doubt. 

Anyway, we are most of us able to sympathize 
with John. A great deal of the unbelief that we 
meet in the streets and that we experience in our 
own hearts to-day grows, just as John’s did, out 
of disappointment. There are thousands of peo- 
ple who are disappointed, may we not say, in God. 
They have an ideal of God. God is the superla- 
tive of which they themselves are the positive. 
“ If I were God,” they say, or think, “ oh, what a 
revolution I would set a-going down here in this 
misguided world! There would be an instant 
end to all oppression. Whoever raised his hand 
to strike an unjust blow, lightning out of the 
clear sky should smite him. There would be a 


THE CREDENTIALS OF CHRISTIANITY. 7 

sudden ceasing of all sorrow. No more pain, no 
more death — all crying done away. All the good 
people should have all the good health and all 
the good money. While doubt should be made 
impossible by the writing of the creed of God in 
great letters of cloud and fire across the blank 
page of the sky.” And because God does not do 
that, does not manage the affairs of the universe 
quite as we would (seeing, possibly, the reasons of 
things somewhat deeper and better than we do), 
people, coming into contact with some of the 
more tragic phases of God’s dealings with men, 
are most grievously disappointed. Nobody, I 
think, will deny that. People are disappointed 
in God. And because they cannot understand 
him, they fall into doubt, as John did. And they 
wonder, sometimes, if in such a misguided uni- 
verse — as they conceive of it — there is any God 
at all. 

But the trouble in the case of John the Baptist 
was altogether with John. If John did not un- 
derstand Jesus, and was disappointed in him, 
that, we see very clearly, was John’s fault. And 
it may be our fault, also, or our ignorance, when 
we are in the same way disappointed in God, and 
fall to questioning and doubting God. 

Whether the cause was depression or disap- 
pointment, John the Baptist had fallen into 


8 


THE CREDENTIALS OF CHRISTIANITY. 


doubt. And somehow getting communication in 
his prison with some of his disciples, he sent 
them to Jesus, asking this question about his 
Messiahship. And Jesus, confronted with this 
group of questioners and doubters, proceeded at 
once to answer them, not by any argument, not 
by any assertion, but by the witness of his works. 
He set these men from John at his right hand and 
bade them look and listen ; and then he went on 
doing what he was always doing and saying what 
he was always saying 5 and after a little while, 
turning to the company of unbelievers, he told 
them simply to go and tell John what they had 
seen and heard ; to go home and think about the 
actual experiences of that hour with Jesus, and to 
tell John. “The blind receive their sight, and 
the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the 
deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor 
have the gospel preached to them.” That was the 
answer that Jesus gave to the representatives of 
doubt. 

The Church of Christ stands to-day just where 
Christ stood. On the one hand is unbelief, and 
on the other hand are pain and poverty. Men 
are coming constantly with that old crucial ques- 
tion : “Art thou he that should come, or do we 
look for another ? ” That question touches, as 1 
said, the very heart of Christianity. The finality 


THE CREDENTIALS OF CHRISTIANITY. 9 

of Jesus of Nazareth, the supremacy of Jesus of 
Nazareth — this is what men are asking about 
to-day. They want to know if the Christian re- 
ligion is the final, the supreme, the divine re- 
ligion, or shall we look for another? What 
are the grounds for accepting and believing 
Christianity ? Wliat are the credentials of Chris- 
tianity ? 

And the answer to the question, if we are to 
return an answer that shall be persuasive and 
convincing, must be not an argument, not an as- 
sertion, but such a sight as Jesus showed. Men 
must see our good works : then we may expect 
them to glorify our divine Master, and our Father 
which is in heaven. The credentials of Christian- 
ity are not creeds but deeds. Wherever the 
Christian religion has ceased to be helpful, men 
have ceased to believe in it ; and rightly, because 
there it has ceased to be Christian. But wherever 
Christianity has been able to bid men look, as 
Jesus did, and see the sorrows of the world com- 
forted, and the wounds of the world bound up, 
and the good news of the gospel carried, with 
light and hope in it, to the hearts of the poor, 
there the Church has won allegiance, and will 
always win allegiance. 

If we desire to minister to the misery of doubt 
and to do it in the Master’s way, we must begin 


10 THE CREDENTIALS OF CHRISTIANITY. 

by ministering to the miseries of pain and pov- 
erty. Jesus Christ, standing between these two 
great problems of our age, solved the one by solv- 
ing the other. He addressed himself to the bet- 
tering and uplifting of the poor. And the blessed 
works which he did made all the answer he 
gave, or needed to give, to the difficulties of the 
doubters. 

Whoever is himself in doubt about the Chris- 
tian faith will find more help in charity than in 
theology. Let him not rely so much upon the 
reading of many Christian books, as upon the 
doing of many Christian works. Let him simply 
try day after day to live like a Christian and he 
will presently find himself believing like a Chris- 
tian. Obedience is the organ of spiritual knowl- 
edge. Whoever does the will of God shall know 
the truth of God. John the Baptist had faith 
enough so long as he was busy at his blessed 
work of helping people. It was only when he 
was shut up in prison, and had no chance to min- 
ister to men, that he fell into doubt. Try to live 
as Christ lived; think not of yourself, but of 
your brother’s need; every day somehow help 
somebody; more and more learn the spirit of 
Christ ; thus will you come unconsciously and in- 
evitably into the possession of all essential Chris- 
tian truth. 


THE CREDENTIALS OF CHRISTIANITY. 11 

Whoever desires to be a missionary of Christ, 
whoever is not content to be a Christian all alone, 
but wants to make some one else Christian, will 
find the sermon that Jesus preached to be the 
most effective sermon. 

If you wish to bring some member of your own 
household into closer relations with religion, it is 
not a good plan to talk a great deal. Urging 
people to attend church effects but little toward 
making Christians out of them. It is better to 
do a great deal. It is better to be the very best 
kind of Christian that you can seven days out of 
every week. Your thoughtfulness, your patience, 
your Christian good-temper, your check upon 
your tongue, your constancy in your personal 
duty of prayer, of Bible-reading, of attendance 
upon the services of the church, your everyday 
helpfulness, your unfailing ministering to the hap- 
piness and bettering of all about you, your deeds 
of charity, your Christian conversation — this is 
better than all the persuasion in the world. If 
you want your husband, or your wife, or your 
brother to be a Christian, be a ten times better 
Christian your own self. 

It can hardly be said too often that a large 
proportion of the infidels of the Christian world 
owe their unbelief to the inconsistent lives of 
people professing Christianity. When the devil 


12 THE CREDENTIALS OF CHRISTIANITY. 

wants to send a missionary to preach the gospel 
of the pit, he gets a Christian. Many a Christian 
woman has kept a soul out of the Church of 
Christ by her pride, by her arrogant manner, by 
her injustice, by her unkind speech. Many a 
Christian man has made a good bargain for his 
bank account and a bad bargain for the Lord 
Jesus Christ and for his own soul, at the same 
time. Men are every day asking John’s ques- 
tion: Art thou he that should come, or do we 
look for another? Is the Christian religion the 
religion of help and truth and righteousness, the 
divine religion which is trying to set up a king- 
dom of heaven down here on this sinful earth, or 
must we look for another? And Christ bids 
them stand by, just as he did in the old time, and 
watch, not now himself, but his representatives 
the Christians. And all depends on what they 
see. And when they behold the Christians cheat- 
ing the blind because they are blind, and exulting 
to outrun the lame, and putting the lepers out of 
doors, and lying to the deaf because they cannot 
hear, and rejoicing in the ruin and death of their 
fellow-men, and preaching to the poor the devil’s 
gospel of tyranny and oppression and extortion — 
do they believe ? Do they come in and beg to be 
admitted into such a Church, and give their de- 
vout allegiance to such men’s Master? u Woe 


THE CREDENTIALS OF CHRISTIANITY. 13 

unto the world because of offenses ; for it must 
needs be that offenses come ” — it must needs be 
that men find stumbling-blocks somewhere along 
their paths — 11 but woe to that man ” — and ten- 
fold woe if he calls himself a Christian, and for a 
pretense make long prayers — “ woe to that man 
by whom the offense cometh ! 11 

All the emphasis of the Christian Church ought 
to be put just where the Lord Jesus Christ put it. 
The Church, like its great Leader, ought to go 
about doing good. To open the eyes of the blind, 
to make the lame walk and the deaf hear, to 
cleanse the lepers, to raise the dead, and to preach 
the gospel to the poor — that is what the Church 
is for. If the Church did that, there would be no 
problem of poverty at all. The men upon whose 
money the working classes depend for wages, the 
employers of labor, the owners of the tenement- 
houses, the lords and princes of the industrial 
world, are for the most part members of Christian 
churches. If they all had the Christian Spirit, if 
they were all Christians, if they all tried to deal 
with the problems of pain and poverty as Christ 
did — oh, what a revolution, what a transforma- 
tion, what a foretaste of the millennium, what a 
realization of the kingdom of heaven ! 

Somehow there is a difference between the 
Church and Christ. We think that we want to 


14 THE CREDENTIALS OF CHRISTIANITY. 

reach the masses. We desire to preach the gospel 
to the poor. But somehow the poor are not at 
all anxious to be preached to. We cannot per- 
suade them into our beautiful churches. But 
when Jesus was here, the only trouble he had was 
to get away from the masses long enough to eat 
and sleep. He journeys far up into the coast of 
Tyre and Sidon, where he thinks that nobody 
knows him. But within an hour some poor peo- 
ple find him out. He cannot be hid. He takes 
a boat and crosses the lake of Galilee, seeking a 
desert place on the other side, where he and his 
disciples may get a day of rest. But behold, a 
great company of blind, and lame, and lepers, 
and mourners, and poor people have gone around 
the head of the lake and have anticipated him. 
And when he arrives at land, lo ! this eager mul- 
titude. “ The common people heard him gladly.” 
That can hardly be said of the Christian Church 
to-day. 

At a labor meeting in New York, the name of 
J esus was applauded to the echo 5 but they hissed 
the Church. In England in the present cam- 
paign, where both parties are trying to gain the 
labor vote, some of the workingmen’s political 
meetings have cursed the parsons. What is the 
matter? The matter is that Jesus Christ loved 
the poor, and that is more than can honestly be 


THE CREDENTIALS OF CHRISTIANITY. 15 

said of the great company of Christians. Jesus 
gave the poor that which is more valuable and 
more helpful than all the money on the earth or 
under the earth, he gave them his attention, his 
thought, his sympathy, his love, his life. The 
matter is that Jesus Christ preached the gospel 
to the poor — the “ gospel of the kingdom ” is the 
whole name of it 5 the good news, that is, that 
the king of this great universe is Father of us 
all, the Father of the poorest man that breathes, 
and that we are brothers in one family. That is 
the gospel that Jesus preached to the poor • and 
he illustrated it and emphasized it by being him- 
self the brother of the poor. We have left that 
gospel too long to be preached and practiced by 
the labor unions, the socialists, the communists. 

Nevertheless, I believe that every New Year 
finds the world more Christian. Year by year 
even the Christian Church is being more and 
more converted to Christianity. The character of 
Christ, the example of Christ, is increasingly 
recognized as being the very heart of our religion. 
And we are trying more and more to put the 
emphasis where he put it, to bring the second 
commandment close up beside the first, to show 
our love for God by loving our brother-men. 

Every year the Church is growing toward a 
realization of that blessed work of Jesus which 


16 THE CREDENTIALS OF CHRISTIANITY. 

he showed to John's disciples. We are showing 
more of that divine helpfulness. Sociology is 
being studied as diligently as theology. Good 
works are being taught as the sign and fruit of 
faith. Wealth is being consecrated anew to the 
service of the Father in heaven. And the old re- 
proach, the old unchristlikeness of the Church, is 
being taken away. God hasten it. 

“ Peace on earth, good-will toward men,” sang 
the shining choir of angels over the fields of 
Bethlehem. We Christians ought to be the peace- 
makers of the world, and the promoters of good- 
will everywhere toward all men. It ought to be 
our Christian study and our Christian prayer that 
the kingdom of God may come in all its fullness, 
that the spirit of real brotherhood — which is the 
spirit of Christ — may more and more grow all 
about us, and that the Christian Church may 
more and more minister as Jesus did, with the 
ministry of love unfading, to the miseries of pain 
and poverty. 


BUSINESS ON CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES. 


u As a nail sticketh fast between the joinings 
of the stones, so doth sin stick close between buy- 
ing and selling.” 

Some time ago I wrote a letter to a number of 
successful business men, asking for information. 
I said that I purposed to preach a sermon, one of 
these days, on the subject of Business on Chris- 
tian Principles. 

“ 1 find it stated,” I wrote, “ in a book of Pro- 
fessor Ely’s that a Young Men’s Christian As- 
sociation in some city decided recently, after de- 
bate, that it is impossible to do business on Chris- 
tian principles; and that an eminent political 
economist has raised the question as to whether 
1 all the preaching about the necessity of righteous- 
ness in business doesn’t simply make men worse,’ 
on this ground, 1 that, as the business world is at 
present constituted, men must commit sin, and 
to point out to them their sinfulness only awakens 
a sense of guilt, and increases their sinfulness.’ 


18 BUSINESS ON CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES. 

“ Now about all this, I know nothing. 
But to preach about Business on Christian Prin- 
ciples without some definite information would 
be to preach either falsehoods or platitudes. 
And the best way I know of is to write to several 
business men of my acquaintance, of whom you 
are one, and ask you frankly to tell me : 

u 1. Is it impossible to do business on Chris- 
tian principles ? Is it true that, as the business 
world is at present constituted, men must com- 
mit sin? 

u 2. If so, what sin, and how ? What are the 
particular practices which are considered com- 
mercially right, but which come into opposition 
to Christian principles? For example, must a 
business man lie? Must he break the fourth 
commandment ? Must he steal ? 

“ 3. And, in general, in your opinion, what do 
you think the Christian pulpit ought to do by 
way of bettering unchristian elements in business 
life ? Leave them alone, except in generalities ? 
or speak of them plainly ? And, if speak of them 
— speak of what ? ” 

This letter was written to about twenty men — 
some of them men whose names were familiar to 
every inhabitant of their city, the leaders of 
great industries, men associated with the most 
extensive of the concerns that have carried the 


BUSINESS ON CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES. 19 

renown of the city even over the wide sea. 
Others were men in subordinate positions, or 
connected with retail houses, or owners of a small 
business, and thus able to look at the problem 
from another point of view. 

The letter made its inquiry of people in many 
different occupations and industries. Iron and 
steel, oil and gas, are represented in the answers. 
So also is the business of the merchant, the 
grocer, the dealer in hardware, the newspaper 
man, the broker, the banker, and the commercial 
traveler. Some of the answers were given in ex- 
tended interviews j most of them were set down 
in writing. Of the written answers a few were 
short ; the majority were of considerable length, 
some of them being a good deal longer than the 
usual limit of my sermons. 

As to the nature of the replies to my question, 
some said one thing, and some another. One 
letter would return an emphatic assertion of the 
purity of all business principles, and in the same 
mail there would be another letter casting sus- 
picion upon the integrity, from the Christian point 
of view, of the most honest rules of commercial 
dealing. Some considered business in general to 
be Christian in its conduct, but excepted certain 
men, or certain branches of commercial life. 
Some held that business is the most Christian in- 


20 BUSINESS ON CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES. 

stitution now existing in the world, maintaining 
that most business men are really Christian mis- 
sionaries, teaching and enforcing the strictest 
Christian ethics. Others confessed that, from 
their point of view, the business world, so far 
from being a house of prayer, is really a great 
den of thieves. The quotations in my letter, these 
correspondents said, represented the real truth, 
that, as the business world is at present consti- 
tuted, men are of necessity forced every day into 
sin. 

I noticed one curious division line running 
through all this interesting and most profitable 
correspondence. The men at the head of great 
industries are unanimous and emphatic in affirm- 
ing the absolute honesty of all decent business. 
But the small traders, the clerks, the commercial 
travelers, are not by any means so sure about 
that. Nearly all the negative answers came from 
them. 

All these letters were so carefully and thought- 
fully written, every one of them so suggestive 
and so instructive, that I am sorry that the space 
does not permit me to quote them all, from the 
first even to the last, without missing a sentence. 
Some of them are as good sermons as I ever 
heard. All that I can do is to quote sentences 
here and there, and to give you their main ideas, 


BUSINESS ON CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES. 21 

and to make some comments upon the general 
subject in the light of this correspondence. 

“ Is it impossible to do business on Christian 
principles ? Is it true that, as the business world 
is at present constituted, men must commit sin ? ” 

“It is said,” writes one correspondent, “that 
there are two sides to all questions ; but the ques- 
tion, ‘Can business be done on Christian prin- 
ciples 1 ’ seems to me to have one side only. It is 
not only possible, but, as a rule, the most profit- 
able, to do business on Christian principles ; and 
I cannot admit for one moment that those prin- 
ciples antagonize legitimate business as the world 
is now constituted.” 

“ As we have been taught,” writes another cor- 
respondent, “ that all things are possible, I must 
say that it is possible to do business on Christian 
principles ; but when and where are very rare in- 
stances, in my humble opinion. I once heard a 
cashier of a now defunct bank tell a prominent 
business man of this city that it was impossible 
to get rich and be honest, except by inheritance, 
or 1 striking it rich 1 by some lucky find. I have 
never been engaged in business for myself to any 
great extent, but I must confess that in almost 
every business in which I have been employed I 
have observed many cases of deception.” 

The next writer represents one of the largest 


22 BUSINESS ON CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES. 

and most widely abused corporations in this 
country. “In my judgment” he writes, “it is 
impossible to succeed in business without Chris- 
tian principles, except temporarily. Therefore it 
is not only not impossible to do business on Chris- 
tian principles, but absolutely necessary. A man 
who does to another in business any differently 
than he would be done by, is not looked upon as 
a first-class business man. It is not true that, as 
the business world is at present constituted, men 
must commit sin, but the contrary.” 

But listen to correspondent number four. “ I 
candidly believe,” he writes, “ that business as at 
present constituted cannot be conducted on 
strictly Christian principles. It is exceedingly 
difficult to actually define just what the unchris- 
tian practices of business are, but they may be 
stated in a general way to be just without the 
pale of honesty with one’s self and one’s neigh- 
bor, and it is hardly possible to avoid their com- 
mission as business is at present constituted.” 

And with this my next correspondent agrees 
heartily. “ My answer to your first question, I 
am sorry to say, is that, as the world is at present 
constituted, it is impossible to do business suc- 
cessfully on Christian principles. It is the fear 
of poverty that causes men to abandon Christian 
principles in business. The business man’s com- 


BUSINESS ON CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES. 23 

petitor, many times not a Christian, resorts to 
practices in business that are actually dishonest. 
That compels a professing Christian to copy them, 
or otherwise stare poverty in the face.” 

On the other hand, here are other voices : “ Is 
it impossible to do business on Christian prin- 
ciples? No. Is it true that, as the business 
world is at present constituted, men must commit 
sin ? No ! ” And another writes : “No ! a thou- 
sand times no ! Business men do not have to 
lie, steal, break any rightful command, or sin in 
any way, in order to be successful.” Still an- 
other declares that the conducting of business on 
Christian principles is “ the only hope of success 
and happiness in this life.” 

Other men, however, are not so pronounced. 
One who holds that business can be done on 
Christian principles admits that it is a difficult 
undertaking. Another, who read my letter to a 
considerable number of business men of his ac- 
quaintance, and reports that every one of them 
pleaded “ not guilty,” and who really pleads “ not 
guilty ” himself, yet confesses that he thought of 
Diogenes with his lantern looking (and not very 
successfully) for an honest man. One correspond- 
ent writes in this guarded way : “To your first 
question I would make reply that business can be, 
and is, done on moral, and therefore Christian, 


24 BUSINESS ON CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES. 

principles by many firms and persons. By this 
I do not mean that perfection is attained, but that 
there is a fixed principle of applied integrity, and 
consequently no more frequent lapses than are 
found in ordinary mortals. I further believe 
that the number of erring brothers is no greater 
pro rata in the commercial world than in any of 
the learned professions, even including that of 
theology. I reiterate my firm conviction that 
business can be done on Christian principles, and 
that some of our most successful men have suc- 
ceeded on this very line.” 

The reference to the clerical profession was 
illustrated in connection with this letter by an 
inclosure of a dozen clippings from the newspa- 
pers of that week, containing reports of various 
misdemeanors on the part of persons legally en- 
titled to write “reverend” before their names. 
“ Ought to be Serving Time in the Penitentiary ” 
was the heading of one of these paragraphs. “A 
Bishop’s Sense of Honor” was another. This 
same position, that the business men are fully as 
good as the parsons, was held by another writer, 
already quoted, who said : “ Business life should 
be, may be, and probably is, as pure as the min- 
istry ; and may be, and probably is, conducted on 
as lofty a ground, and for as lofty ends, upon the 
average.” And another, carrying the same battle 


BUSINESS ON CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES. 25 

a little farther into the regions ecclesiastical, says 
this : u Nor do I know of any commercial prac- 
tices that are in opposition to Christian prin- 
ciples ; but there is a high standard of commer- 
cial integrity that business men do not look for 
nor expect to find in so-called religious men. 
This is not the fault of Christian principles. It 
is a fact,” he concludes, “ that may give you some 
food for thought.” As indeed it does ! 

And yet here is an epistle as long as two ser- 
mons, which begins thus: “Your letter is at 
hand, and its contents noted with alarm and 
amazement. The subject is one on which my 
thoughts have repeatedly dwelt, and with no other 
result than pain and distressful confusion. In 
fact, there is little in the business world that will 
bear comparison with ideal standards and Chris- 
tian holiness. The dominating principle in busi- 
ness is selfishness under the form of competition. 
The rule of Christianity is to love your brother 
as yourself. These principles evoke inevitable 
conflict.” 

Some of my correspondents, on the other hand, 
are so emphatic in their certainty of the Christian 
element in business, that they have their opinion, 
and that not a favorable one, of the young men 
whose vote was quoted in my letter. One busi- 
ness man thinks that they were probably boys 


26 BUSINESS ON CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES. 

who knew nothing whatever about business. 
Another says that “ no decent, honest man could 
suggest that business could not be conducted 
upon Christian principles successfully.” Still 
another writes : “ 1 am sorry for the young men 
in that Christian Association who decided in the 
manner they did, for it only too plainly shows the 
class of business associates they have had. To 
them I would say, Come up out of the Chatham 
Streets of the business world that you are in, and 
breathe the atmosphere of the broad-gauge, lib- 
eral, honest, and honorable avenues of the com- 
mercial world, and you will change your vote.” 

Thus my first question was answered by a con- 
fusion of voices, some saying “yes,” and some 
“no”: but the majority maintaining most ear- 
nestly that it is not only possible to do business on 
Christian principles, but that as a fact business is 
actually done on Christian principles, in the great 
proportion of commercial houses. 

In this connection I read with interest a Code 
of Ethics, which one of my correspondents gave 
me in place of a written answer to my letter. 
This document is the report of a committee ap- 
pointed by a union of employers of a certain 
kind of labor. It was compiled from papers read 
at meetings of local branches of this union held 
in most of the large cities of this country. It is 


BUSINESS ON CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES. 27 

valuable as embodying the judgment of thou- 
sands of experienced men as to the best methods 
of conducting business. This Code of Ethics 
reads like a commentary on the Sermon on the 
Mount. 

“We must use every effort” so the code be- 
gins, “ to develop moral and intellectual manhood. 
We should firmly resolve to test every transac- 
tion by the standard of truth and justice. Take 
advantage of no man's ignorance. See that em- 
ployees are truthful and straightforward, and do 
not misrepresent nor overcharge the confiding. 
We must be as honorable in every particular as 
we would have our competitors. 

11 When a young competitor enters the ranks, 
welcome him as a new soldier to the field, and 
help him to any information and assistance that 
will enable him to overcome the difficulties we 
had so much difficulty in surmounting. It should 
be a duty and pleasure to impart to our less ex- 
perienced competitors the knowledge we possess, 
so long as we are satisfied that the information 
generously given will be honorably used. In the 
conduct of our establishments, it should be our 
constant endeavor to elevate the moral character 
of our workmen who are engaged with us. 
While it should be our firm and unalterable de- 
termination not to be dictated to by labor organ- 


28 BUSINESS ON CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES. 

izations when their demands are unfair, or which 
substitute the will of a prejudiced majority for 
the conservative teachings of common sense and 
justice, we should be slow to condemn the action 
of our employees, as it is possible that the in- 
fluences controlling them may be more than 
they are able to resist.” 

This Code of Ethics, it should be remembered, 
was not set forth for the information of the pub- 
lic, but was prepared and circulated among this 
company of employers as a private statement of 
the ideals in which they all agreed for the trans- 
acting of their business. I cannot imagine any- 
thing more Christian. 

Nevertheless this code begins with a statement 
of the evils of competition. Side by side with 
this beautiful ideal is set a glimpse of most un- 
satisfactory present conditions. We are taught 
the nine evils, the nine deadly sins, that accom- 
pany competition in the industrial world as it is 
at present constituted. The first is “ moral weak- 
ness,” the bidder not having the courage to ask 
an honest price for his work. The second is 
“ mortification and chagrin ” ; mortification when 
we miss the order, and chagrin when upon get- 
ting it we find we must lose money on it. The 
third evil is “ envy, jealousy, and hatred of our 
neighbor.” The fourth evil is “ inadequate com- 


BUSINESS ON CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES. 29 

pensation for all kinds of work.” The fifth is 
“ corruption of the customer,” who plays us one 
against another, to our loss financial and to his 
loss spiritual. 

Sixthly, there comes a constant “ temptation to 
dishonesty ” ; we get the order at a low bid, and 
put in poor work to keep on the right side of the 
books. The seventh evil is “ loss of reputation,” 
the poor work coming to the light. “Loss of 
self-respect” is eighth in the list of the evils of 
competitive bidding. Here is what the code says 
under that head: “For, although the ignorance 
of the customer may enable the sharp bidder to 
impose upon him goods or work which are not 
up to the standard agreed upon, the bidder, who 
does know better, cannot quiet the still, small 
voice of conscience, which is continually remind- 
ing him although he bears a fair reputation in the 
community, he knows himself to be like a whited 
sepulcher.” Finally the whole bad business winds 
up in “ poor credit, bankruptcy, and ruin.” 

It appears, then, that there is some distance 
between the ideal and the real ; between present 
conditions, at least in that particular branch of 
industry, and the conditions as the best men in 
the business would like them to be. For this 
code bears a very recent date; and my friend 
who called my attention to it informed me that 


30 BUSINESS ON CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES. 

before its introduction here in Pittsburg, the com- 
peting representatives of that kind of labor were 
in a bitter and increasing wrangle, trying every 
day (commercially) to cut each other’s throats. 

Another business man, who did me the favor 
to show me in detail the entire working of his 
great establishment, told me that the endeavor 
to keep up such a local union of the representa- 
tives of his branch of trade here in this city had 
proved a failure. 

Accordingly, answering my own first question 
from the information which I have gathered, it is 
perfectly possible for the head of any business to 
conduct it in an absolutely Christian way and be 
successful. The most Christian men I know are 
successful business men. And yet, a great deal 
of business might be a great deal more Christian 
than it is. The world of business is not the king- 
dom of heaven yet. 

And here comes in my second question. Agree- 
ing that the ideals, say of a majority of business 
men, are Christian, but confessing that there 
are nevertheless unchristian practices in business : 
what are these unchristian practices ? This ques- 
tion I asked again and again, trying to get defi- 
nite examples. I got a good many. 

“As a nail sticketh fast between the joinings 
of the stones, so doth sin stick close between buy- 


BUSINESS ON CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES. 31 

ing and selling.” That is as true to-day as it was 
when it was written. Buying and selling are 
transactions for the making of mone}'. And the 
love of money, the wise scriptures tell us, is the 
fertile soil in which grows all manner of iniquity. 
It is astounding, it is incredible, what men will 
do for the love of money. 

People think sometimes, I suppose, that we 
have no further need in these days for the second 
commandment of the ten. We do not worship 
graven images. Is that true? Did any pagan 
worship his fetish ever more reverently, pray to 
it more confidently, put more trust in its power 
to help or harm, than some men worship, implore, 
and believe in the omnipotence of the minted 
dollar ? There are not lacking examples, in every 
community, of men who seem to put gain in the 
place of everything, who think of the making of 
money more than they think of anything else, 
and who allow that thought to push out every 
other thought, even the thought of God. 

It is possible to buy and sell with perfect hon- 
esty, without the harming in any way of any 
brother-man, and yet to let that buying and sell- 
ing harm a man’s own soul. One of the essen- 
tials, if a business man is to conduct his business 
on Christian principles, is to put Christianity be- 
fore business, the soul before the body, to seek 


32 BUSINESS ON CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES. 

the kingdom of God and his righteousness first. 
It is a wonder what some good business men will 
do with themselves in the world to come. They 
have never really thought of anything but buying 
and selling. What will they do in a world that 
will be as empty of buying and selling as the old 
temple after Jesus had expelled the traders? 

No man who makes even an honest business 
the whole of his life, so that even Sunday is only 
a chance to get rested for the sake of working 
harder Monday morning, and the heaping up of 
treasure down here leaves no time for the gather- 
ing of treasure up above, and the man’s heart, 
his real heart, is all of it in his business where 
his treasure is — no such man can possibly be 
said, except in a superficial way, to be conducting 
his business on principles which would be ap- 
proved of by the Lord Jesus Christ. 

WTien we think, however, of unchristian prac- 
tices in business, we think more readily of such 
business methods as harm, not so much the soul 
of the man of business, as the interests of the 
men with whom he deals. Unfortunately, there 
seem to be people in this world who care more 
for money than they do for men, who will rob 
their own brothers — so it be within the letter of 
the law — and look on at their pain, their priva- 
tion, their poverty, with a sense of absolutely in- 


BUSINESS ON CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES. 33 

fernal satisfaction, rejoicing in the addition of so 
many dollars to their store. There are men who 
actually oppose themselves to the uplifting of 
their brother-men, and who, having the power, do 
persistently keep down whole multitudes of men 
and women and little children in conditions un- 
speakably degrading. I mean such men, for ex- 
ample, to go away a safe distance, as those two in 
London who own nearly all that horrible district 
of Whitechapel, and are responsible for the black 
shadow of that hideous comer of darkest Eng- 
land, and refuse to sell at a fair price to buyers 
who would transform that place of torment into 
something nearer paradise. I mean the tene- 
ment-house owners in New York, who have to be 
compelled by the courts to put in decent plumb- 
ing, and who even then appeal from court to 
court, putting it off as long as they can, letting 
their tenants in the meantime die like flies. I 
mean the owner of any tenement-house anywhere, 
where, for the sake of money, our brothers and 
our sisters are suffered to live in conditions that 
inevitably poison body and soul. 

Somehow there seems to be a great deal of 
trouble in the world of industry. I have read 
about it at considerable length, and for a good 
while, and on both sides. I confess that I do not 


34 BUSINESS ON CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES. 

understand enough about it yet to give advice. 
Evidently there is something wrong. Evidently 
there is something fearfully unchristian some- 
where in a business world in which a common 
cab-horse is better cared for than a common man. 
Something is the matter where men want work, 
and there is no work for them to do, and for want 
of work they starve. Something is out of joint 
where men work and work and work, from the 
dark of morning to the dark of evening, and have 
absolutely nothing in their lives but work $ and 
yet, with all that, barely get enough to keep the 
life in their bodies. And the whole family has 
to work, the mother and the little children, and 
yet, with all that, starvation sits every day beside 
the door. It seems to me that there must be 
something unchristian somewhere between buy- 
ing and selling, when a man sells his whole life 
and the lives of his whole family for a mere 
tenth or twentieth part of what is daily wasted 
in many a wealthy home. And I believe that it 
is the duty of every man who is an employer of 
labor to study this problem, as he studies his ac- 
count-book or his prayer-book, and try to find the 
Christian solution. The art of gathering a great 
fortune has been discovered. Now we need to 
know the art of perfectly just and Christian dis- 
tribution. 


BUSINESS ON CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES. 35 

I am more concerned, however, in this sermon 
with the unchristian practices of ordinary busi- 
ness. And here I find, as almost everywhere else 
in modern life, that the love of money is sharp- 
ened by keen competition. Whether a man loves 
money or not, he hates poverty. Every man in 
a small business fears to be poor. Business is a 
race. And in this race it is every man for him- 
self — and poverty (if not the devil) take the hind- 
most. Probably there is more temptation to-day 
to set sin between buying and selling than ever 
before, on account of this fierce, unceasing, and 
unsparing competition. 

It is competition that makes a merchant take 
in more orders than he can fill, and make promises 
that he cannot keep. He tells you that it will be 
done on Tuesday when he knows that it will not 
be finished under two weeks. That is a lie. And 
when you go to find the reason for the delay, he 
gives a reason, probably a lying reason. This is 
a small matter $ yet a lie is never a small matter. 

It is competition that persuades men to use 
false weights and measures. It is competition 
that induces men to adulterate foods and medi- 
cines and so to poison men for money ; half of 
the drunken men are not drunk, they are drugged, 
poisoned, for the sake of money. The whole vast 
liquor business, which opens on every corner a 


36 BUSINESS ON CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES. 


door into the infernal regions, which reaches out 
into the homes of the nation like the tenth plague 
of Egypt laying low the first-born, which causes 
more unspeakable misery than any other traffic 
under the sun, would be abandoned to-morrow if 
there were no money in it. 

It is competition, and the popular eagerness to 
get things cheap, that puts down prices, say of 
clothing, lower, and lower, and lower, till you are 
amazed. Who loses, do you think, by these low 
prices which we account as gain for us? The 
manager of the business ? Never. It is the poor 
seamstress, sewing and starving in the tenement- 
house, making calico wrappers at a dollar and a 
half a dozen, and neckties at twenty-five cents a 
dozen, and flannel shirts at twenty cents a dozen. 
The great majority of the “bargains” that people 
run after mean some sort of unchristian principle 
in business. 

The nine deadly sins of competitive bidding 
make a strong illustration of the presence of un- 
christian elements in business. The fundamental 
principle of Christianity, as one of my correspond- 
ents said, is that we should love our neighbor as 
ourself; and that whole matter of secret com- 
petitive bidding, as it has been explained to me, 
with its principle of different prices to different 
people, is a constant and persuasive invitation to 


BUSINESS ON CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES. 37 

iniquity. The buyer makes use of it to beat down 
the seller, to keep him in the dark as to the real 
conditions of the bargain, and to practice extor- 
tion upon him. I have had commercial travelers 
tell me that they could not possibly join the 
Christian Church because they could not live in 
their business according to its spirit. Now I 
know what that means. No man has a greater 
provocation to distrust the Christianity of the 
business world than the commercial traveler. On 
the other hand, this evil of competitive bidding 
tempts the seller to furnish goods of poorer qual- 
ity than the specifications. These bids which I 
have in mind are not those that are made for the 
erection of buildings or of public works ; they 
are the every-day transactions between the buyer 
of every commercial establishment and the men 
who come to get his orders. 

Take this as one example. There is a great 
deal of steel made in Pittsburg. Some of it is 
made by the Bessemer process, some by the open- 
hearth process, ‘some by the crucible process. 
Nearly the same stock is used in all these proc- 
esses, but the quality of the result is very differ- 
ent. Now we are manufacturers, say of hatchets ; 
and we make two grades of hatchets, one out of 
open-hearth and the better out of crucible steel. 
These hatchets look exactly alike. They look as 


38 BUSINESS ON CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES. 

much alike as iron rails look like steel rails. And 
iron rails, I am informed, look so much like steel 
rails that, in the days before the Inter-State Com- 
merce Law made it a criminal offense, reputable 
merchants, men of standing in the community, 
billed steel as iron, and so got a lower freight 
price from the railroad company j and by telling 
an absolute lie, stole just so much money from 
the railroad corporation. Why, I might as well 
go into a book-store and put a two-dollar-and-a- 
half book into my overcoat pocket, and tell the 
clerk I had taken a two-dollar book. That false 
billing was nothing but a combination of lying 
and stealing. 

But to return to the hatchets. The open-hearth 
hatchet looks so much like the better crucible 
hatchet that we mark the better one with a bet- 
ter handle. Now comes a customer who wants 
to buy a large bill of hatchets. He has bought 
from us for several years and we want to keep 
his custom. But he informs us that he has a 
lower bid than we gave him last year. Some one 
will sell cheaper. What shall we do? After a 
little figuring we accept the bid. But the cus- 
tomer goes away, and we find that the crucible 
hatchets that he expects will be an actual loss to 
us. And so we quietly make open-hearth hatchets 
and fit them out with crucible-hatchet handles. 


BUSINESS ON CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES. 39 

We ship the goods, and the customer presently 
discovers that the quality this year is not so good 
as it was last year. He writes to find out why : 
“ Did you make those hatchets out of the same 
stock that I had before ¥ ” Immediately we write 
back, “ My dear sir, we gave you exactly the same 
material both years.” Yes, the same material, 
but not put through the same process ! And so 
the man is first robbed and then lied to. 

All this is the result of competition badly man- 
aged. One of my correspondents set down for 
me a long list of commercial lies that had come 
under his own observation. And all of these 
were misrepresentations made under the stress of 
competition. Business, in some of its depart- 
ments, seems to be a rough-and-tumble fight for 
custom. One man told me that he never went to 
bed at night without being afraid that some com- 
petitor of his would steal his business before 
morning. Competition beats down prices below 
the honest value of the article, and the low price 
induces a low quality, and all sorts of sharp prac- 
tices. 

One business man, who says that u no one will 
deny that there exist unprincipled men in all oc- 
cupations,” but who feels “ sorry for any one who 
claims it as a necessity,” writes as follows : “ The 
honest merchant marked his prices in plain fig- 


40 BUSINESS ON CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES. 

Tires, and all purchasers fared alike. This plan 
was so fast destroying the trade of the unscrupu- 
lous dealers that they had to adopt it, and to-day 
the majority of retail dealers have this system — 
we may say from policy rather than from prin- 
ciple — hut the result is that the innocent pur- 
chaser does not pay the price of a good article for 
a poor one.” My correspondent mentions only 
the retail trade. I understand that this is more 
and more getting to be the custom in all trade. 
A fixed and honest figure for every class of goods, 
with exactly so much discount for such-and-such 
an amount of purchase, and such-and-such a 
length of time, with a possible variation accord- 
ing to the rating of the customer’s credit at the 
commercial agencies, the whole matter fairly un- 
derstood and lived up to would vastly increase 
the proportion of Christian dealing in the busi- 
ness world. The passing of such a law as the 
Inter-State Commerce Act, with its brand of legal 
criminality upon unchristian practices heretofore 
countenanced by professing Christians, shows the 
need of business reformation, and indicates the 
growth of public opinion in a Christian direction. 
The formation of unions of employers, adopting 
such a Code of Ethics as the one from which I 
quoted, proves a recognition on the part of busi- 
ness men of unchristian elements in business 


BUSINESS ON CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES. 41 

which even the Inter-State Commerce Law has 
not remedied, and evinces a determination, with- 
out recourse to law, to do away with these evils 
in their own transaction of their own business. 

Several things ought, I think, to be remembered 
in estimating the general morality of business life. 
One is that there are dishonest men in business 
as there are in every department of human exist- 
ence. And it is the dishonest men who get their 
names into the newspapers. A daily paper is of 
necessity a most unfair representation of the daily 
life of a community. One who should estimate 
our common conduct from the columns of a daily 
paper would set us down as a community of poli- 
ticians. The man who is struck by a cable car 
attracts the attention of the whole neighborhood. 
Thousands of other people go by unnoticed. 
There is the same proportion between the men 
who deliberately lie and steal and the vast com- 
pany of honest Christians who would sooner cut 
off their right hand. 

Another matter that has been brought to my 
observation is the great difficulty of always dis- 
tinguishing the right from the wrong. Questions 
of casuistry come up in every business office 
every day. They have to be settled immediately. 
Some sort of rough and approximate judgment 
must at once be rendered. Sometimes that judg- 


42 BUSINESS ON CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES. 

ment is against equity and Christianity. But I 
believe that in more than nine cases out of ten 
the man who is in a respectable business acts as 
he honestly thinks just and right. 

Two of my correspondents, for example, pro- 
pose almost the same case, and decide it differ- 
ently. The case is the amount of information 
which the seller ought to give the buyer in a bar- 
gain. One writer, who is one of the wealthiest 
and best-known citizens of his town, maintains 
that u we can withhold truth on proper occasions 
without falsifying. A reasonable construction of 
the principle,” he says, u when applied to business 
transactions, requires us to regard those with 
whom we deal as our equals, as having equal 
ability and better opportunity than we have of 
knowing what best suits themselves. We are not 
therefore bound to become their guardians, or to 
advise them as to what we consider their best 
interest in the transaction. Duty to ourselves 
dispenses with this where it would conflict with 
our interests. The healthy application of the 
principle requires no such transcendental moral- 
ity even where, in our opinion, it would be better 
for our customer not to make the deal. We 
would often be mistaken ; he might be shrewder 
or know more than we, and society prospers bet- 
ter to let each attend to his own business, and 


BUSINESS ON CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES. 43 

judge what is to his own interests. At the 
same time,” adds my correspondent, “ we are not 
allowed to hold back the truth in a manner cal- 
culated to mislead or deceive. The purchaser, 
under such circumstances, deals at arm’s-length 
with the seller, and cannot complain afterward 
that he was cheated, in case the transaction does 
not turn out as he expected.” 

On the other hand, this is the way in which 
this bargain appears from the point of view to 
the man who lost in it. “ The object of business,” 
says this correspondent, “is to gain, and if the 
profit and loss shows balance on the wrong side, 
the business must be abandoned as a loss or sold 
to some one else. Now it may be doubtful moral- 
ity to sell to another what you won’t any longer 
own because you can’t make it pay and perhaps 
the buyer can. It is not loving him as yourself. 
But in business that is none of your business. 
He looks out for himself, the law presumes he 
does — and the law provides a remedy through its 
courts only when the buyer happens to have been 
a lunatic or other such incapable person, or when 
the transaction was effected under clear misrep- 
resentation. The shrewder man gains by the 
other’s weakness. The sensation is not pleasant 
when you realize this at your cost, and you neve’ 
feel quite the same toward that man afterward/ 


44 BUSINESS ON CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES. 

Now there are the two sides of that bargain. 
And there are the differing views of two honest 
men as to the Christianity of that transaction. I 
confess that my sympathies in this matter are 
with the second writer. The first position lends 
an easy opportunity to the heresy of Cain. “Am 
I my brother’s keeper?” is not a question to 
which, when put directly, any of us would like to 
answer, “ No.” I doubt the Christianity of treat- 
ing the buyer as an equal. I cannot imagine the 
Lord, as a carpenter at Nazareth, treating his 
customers barely as equals, and throwing all the 
blame of a bad bargain on their shoulders. I am 
sure that he would treat men not as equals (that 
is the language of contention) but as brothers. 
And I know of more instances than I like to think 
of where men treated as equals by Christian 
men shrewder than they were have come out of 
their losing bargains having just the feeling of 
which the second writer speaks, and having it not 
only against the man who took the money in that 
perfectly legal way, but against the whole Chris- 
tian religion which he represents. Hard bargains 
at arm’s-length have kept hundreds of men out of 
the Church of Christ. 

I have spoken of the dishonest minority who 
have to be remembered in estimating the morality 
of business life. I have spoken, also, of the diffi- 


BUSINESS ON CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES. 45 

eulty which even the honest man finds in his en- 
deavor to give exactly the right solution to his 
daily problems in ethics. 

I desire now to express my sympathy with the 
man in the subordinate position who finds his 
conscience quicker than his employer's. I mean 
the man who is sent out to lie, or the man who is 
instructed to attach the wrong labels, or to mis- 
represent values. I have been told by some men 
who are eminent in business life that in their ex- 
perience such men do not exist. It has been rep- 
resented to me, and the argument is certainly a 
uersuasive one, that if a man were to instruct his 
clerks to he to their customers, or to take money 
out of their pockets, he would be simply giving 
them lessons in the art of dishonesty, and would 
have no reason to be disappointed if they applied 
these lessons to his own disadvantage. Evidently, 
if a man will he to a customer, he will just as 
easily he to his employer. The business man who 
told me that business men are missionaries of ab- 
solute righteousness had in view the scrupulous 
honesty which a good business exacts from ah 
who are concerned in it. And I agree with him 
that association with some of the upright, honor- 
able, immaculately just, and Christian business 
men of this city would be in itself a training in 
ah that is best in religion, that could not be 


46 BUSINESS ON CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES. 

equaled in any parish church in Christendom. 
In the concerns with which these men are asso- 
ciated there is no constraint put on any man’s 
conscience. 

Nevertheless, I know it to he a fact that in 
reputable industries in some places men are set 
tasks that cannot be done with the honest truth 
for a witness. And I say that I am sorry for the 
men who are given these tasks to do. Their daily 
bread depends upon their obedience. When they 
think of protesting, they remember their families 
at home. And, very often, the matter is only 
one of those questions of casuistry, those fine dis- 
tinctions between the transcendental and the prac- 
tical in ethics, which the man at the head has 
simply happened to decide in a way which does 
not meet the under man’s approval. His con- 
science is quicker than his chiefs. The employer 
honestly thinks, perhaps, that this questionable 
thing is right. Now, what shall the man do ? A 
good many times he puts aside his scruples, per- 
suades himself that his employer must bear the 
blame, thinks, perhaps, that he has a foolish and 
misleading conscience, and goes and writes a lie. 

But according to the testimony of the best men 
in business, the great majority of decent busi- 
ness men want to do that which is unquestionably 
right. They are all agreed that it is better to be 


BUSINESS ON CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES. 47 

honest than to he shrewd. They maintain with 
entire unanimity that a reputation for honorable 
dealing is the very best capital that a man can 
put into his business. It seems, then, that the 
best advice that can be given to any clerk, or 
to any employee whatsoever, when he is told 
to do what is against his conscience, is frankly 
to say so. He is to take it for granted that his 
employers desire to do the very most Christian 
thing they can. To bring his conscientious 
scruples to their notice is to pay them the highest 
tribute of respect, and also to commend himself 
in the surest way to their esteem. If, however, 
this does not prove in actual experience to work, 
the meaning is that the young man has the mis- 
fortune to serve dishonest men. And that means 
that he is engaged in a business that is bound 
sooner or later to come to disgraceful failure. 
The law of certain retribution for dishonesty is 
just as sure as the law of gravitation. The sooner 
he gets out of that falling building the better. 

But if he has to face starvation ! If he has a 
choice to make between a lie and a loaf of bread, 
if he has a choice to make between pain of body 
and pain of soul, he must make it. No one need 
expect to find it altogether easy to be a Christian. 
In the past, men have many times found it neces- 
sary to choose between being Christians and be- 


48 BUSINESS ON CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES. 

ing put to a painful death. And they have made 
their choice. Many a man has died rather than 
lie. All honor, now and forever, to the noble 
army of martyrs. Still that army marches on. 
And day by day, good men and brave men, of 
whom the world is not worthy, are found willing 
to enlist in the great fight of the hosts of God 
against the allies of the devil, and to enlist for 
the whole war, come what may. 

And so the answer to the second question of 
my letter, u Must a man, in order to be successful, 
he or steal ? ” is, “ No,” and “ no ” a thousand times 
repeated. The emphatic testimony of business 
men who have succeeded is that genuine honesty 
and genuine success are married together, and 
cannot be divorced either in this world or in the 
next. 

As for the third question of my letter, touching 
the duty of the preacher, I have tried to fohow 
the good advice of my correspondents in the writ- 
ing of this sermon. 

Our Lord, being asked to settle a dispute about 
a questionable transaction, declined. Into the 
addition and subtraction of the dollars and cents 
of that matter he refused to enter. He contented 
himself with laying down a deep and eternal prin- 
ciple, which, applied, would settle that and all 
other like questions. 11 Take heed,” he said, “ and 


BUSINESS ON CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES. 49 

beware of covetousness, for a man’s life consisteth 
not in the abundance of the things which he pos- 
sessed.” 

How that meets this whole difficulty, and settles 
it, not by any outside influence, not by law, not 
by arbitration, but by a change in a man’s own 
heart ! The surest way to get all business con- 
ducted on Christian principles is to get all the 
business men converted to Christianity. 

Be loyal to Christ with all your heart. Set his 
example before you as the unfailing pattern of 
your daily life. Meet the daily problems of your 
business as you honestly think he himself would 
meet them, if he sat in your place at your office 
desk. Try to live in your town as he lived in 
Capernaum, true as he was, honest as he was, 
loving God as he did, and loving all your brother- 
men with that genuine love that you would like 
to have Christ find in your heart, and you will 
conduct your business — yes, and succeed in it to 
the uttermost — on Christian principles. 


THE DRY BROOK. 


“And it came to pass, after awhile, that the 
brook dried up, because there was no rain in the 
land.” 

This is a part of the story of the education of 
Elijah. Elijah had come over out of Gilead upon 
an errand from the Lord God Almighty. The 
people of Israel had fallen into base idolatry. 
They had made a spiritual rebellion. They had 
dethroned God. And Elijah came to bring them 
back into allegiance. “And Elijah the Tishbite, 
who was of the sojourners of Gilead, said unto 
Ahab, As the Lord, the God of Israel, liveth, be- 
fore whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor 
rain these years but according to my word.” That 
was Elijah’s message. That was the beginning 
of his mission. And when he had said that, when 
he had brought that word from the living God to 
the rebellious king, he went away and hid himself 
beside this brook. And then God began to make 
him ready for the next part of his great work. 
God went on educating Elijah. 


THE DRY BROOK. 


51 


It is not likely that Elijah was ever graduated 
from any school, or ever read a book in all his 
life, not even the Bible. God is all the time edu- 
cating messengers, missionaries, men and women 
who are to do his work in the world. That is 
how God does his work, by setting us to do it, 
and, first of all, by educating us so that we may 
be able to do it. Everybody has some work of 
God to do, and is under the education of God. 
And God educates us in many ways j sometimes 
out of the pages of books ; but most of all, and 
always, out of that open book which is written in 
the universal language, to be read of all, and in 
which we have a lesson every day — the book of 
life, the book of human experience. God was 
teaching Elijah his lessons, not out of a dry book, 
but out of a dry brook. 

All the land over, God was teaching terrible 
lessons out of the dry brooks. Everybody was 
in Elijah’s class. Day after day, till the weeks 
grew into months, the sky glowed like a furnace, 
and the earth was parched into hot dust, and all 
the green things in the fields withered, and all 
living creatures went athirst and hungry. There 
was one word in every heart, and that word 
was “famine.” Everything else was forgotten. 
Everybody prayed for rain. 

The first thing, if you are to teach anybody, is 


52 


THE DRY BROOK. 


to get attention. Even God must have attention 
And sometimes it takes a strange sight — indeed, 
sometimes it takes a tragedy or a famine — to get 
men to look in God’s direction, and to listen to 
his voice. It did here. 

These people were wholly given over to the 
secular side of life. They were all the time look- 
ing down, and never up. We read about the 
golden calves at Dan and Bethel, and about 
temples and groves of Baal and Ashtaroth at 
Samaria and Jezreel, and all that old life seems 
far away, and foreign, and obsolete, and alto- 
gether out of relation with the life we live to-day. 
But human nature does not greatly change. 
Names change, but the facts which lie be- 
hind them continue. Languages, customs, skies 
change ; the center of the world moves from one 
land to another ; outwardly there is absolute 
revolution, everything is different: Dan and 
Bethel, Samaria and Jezreel, fall into ruins, and 
New York and Philadelphia, Pittsburg and Chi- 
cago, take their places ; and Baal and Ashtaroth 
are dead. But men and women meet the same 
temptations still and fall into the same sins. 
The devil wears a different dress ; that is about 
the only difference. 

The golden calves at Dan and Bethel were set 
up as a substitute for the old religion. That was 


THE DRY BROOK. 


53 


what they meant. They signified unrest, dissat- 
isfaction, desire for change. Let us go no more 
to church ; let us seek God along some other path. 
They were, of course, a political necessity. The 
northern kingdom had separated from the south- 
ern, and the northern people were no longer wel- 
come at Jerusalem. Nevertheless, they had then- 
own individual meaning. They represented a 
religious separation — that is, they stood for a 
condition of things with which we are perfectly 
familiar. They represented a distinctly modern 
temper. It is a characteristic of our own day, 
also, that multitudes of people are turning away 
from Jerusalem and trying to find God some- 
where else, at Dan or at Bethel. 

And the next step in religion in that ancient 
commonwealth was to build a temple to Baal and 
to plant a grove to Ashtaroth. A significant 
step ! Baal was the god of business and Ash- 
taroth was the goddess of society — that is, among 
the Hebrews of King Ahab’s day the worshipers 
of Baal were for the most part men who set busi- 
ness before religion, and the worshipers of Ash- 
taroth were for the most part women who set so- 
ciety before religion. 

For King Ahab wanted to make money. He 
desired to strengthen the state. And as his tastes 
were for the arts of peace rather than for the 


54 


THE DRY BROOK. 


glories of war, he turned his attention to com- 
merce. And the great commercial nation in that 
neighborhood in that day was Phoenicia, up on 
the sea-coast, having Tyre and Sidon for its ports, 
and sending its ships far out along the Medi- 
terranean Sea. But the Phoenicians worshiped 
Baal. To be friendly with the Phoenicians meant 
a companionship with idolaters. And that God 
had forbidden. To make an alliance with Phoe- 
nicia, and to make it strong, meant a recognition 
of Phoenician religion. And that was a breaking 
of the foremost of the commandments. On the 
other hand, it insured commercial success. It 
was the path to business prosperity. That was 
the alternative which confronted Ahab. Shall I 
put business first, or the commandments of God 
first ? And so I say that, whatever that old god 
Baal may have meant in Tyre and Sidon, among 
King Ahab’s people it meant the adoration of the 
dollar. And that, I believe, is not an obsolete 
religion. 

And then, to make alliance doubly strong, Ahab 
married Jezebel, daughter of the Phoenician king. 
And Jezebel brought with her a great company 
of priests of Ashtaroth, four hundred of whom 
ate at her own table. And so the worship of 
Ashtaroth with Baal became a part of the life of 
Ahab’s court. Everybody who wanted to stand 


THE DRY BROOK. 


55 


well at court must pay devotion at the shrine of 
Ashtaroth. Presently, as the fierce temper of the 
queen showed itself, the choice between religion 
and society became more sharp and imperative. 
All the nobility of Israel, all the princes and prel- 
ates, all the great lords and the fine ladies, had 
to choose between court and conscience, between 
the approbation of Jezebel and the approbation 
of Jehovah. That is what Ashtaroth meant. 
Ashtaroth was the goddess of irreligious society. 
And all her worshipers had preferred pleasure 
and social position to the obedience of God. 

Baal and Ashtaroth were the deities of Ahab’s 
Israel. God was forgotten. Then the drought 
came, and the brooks ran dry. And famine fol- 
lowed, and there was a sudden stop in all that 
irreligious business, and a sudden break in the 
gayeties of all that irreligious society. And men 
and women began to think. They began to pay 
attention to the voice of God. 

This is one of the benedictions of disaster : that 
it sets us face to face with the realities of life. 
We come into an irresistible recognition of the 
fact that there is something more valuable than 
money, and more precious than pleasure. Day 
by day we are busy doing our day’s work, occu- 
pied with the small interests which crowd our 
time, set upon transitory purposes, taken up with 


56 


THE DRY BROOK. 


matters of the moment. And these things seem 
the only realities there are. God is out of sight 
and out of mind. Heaven and hell are theolog- 
ical expressions. Prayer is of no practical value. 
But we can put our hand on the round face of 
the dollar. W e can he absolutely sure of the ex- 
istence of a dollar. That, anyhow, is real. 

And then comes trouble. And what a change 
that makes ! What a reversal of all our valua- 
tions ! Can money help us ? Can society console 
us? O Baal, hear us! But there is no voice, 
nor any that answers. Baal is silent ; Ashtaroth 
is silent. And here is the drought and the fam- 
ine, and the brook is dried up because there is no 
rain in the land. Then we begin to think. And 
we remember God. And we change the emphasis 
of our life, and put it in a better place. And the 
dry brook teaches the lesson which it taught in 
Ahab’s day — the lesson of the supremacy of God, 
the lesson of the infinite seriousness of life. 

But Elijah knew that lesson. There was no 
need to teach that to Elijah. Let the other brooks 
dry up 5 but this brook Cherith at Elijah’s feet — 
surely God will keep that full of water. Morning 
and evening come the ravens, bringing breakfast 
and supper to the hungry prophet, and he drinks 
the water of the brook. God is taking care of 
Elijah. The hot sun glares out of the sky, but 


THE DRY BROOK. 


57 


the deep valley is in the shadow. The famine 
tightens its hold upon the starving people, hut 
Elijah neither thirsts nor hungers. And he paces 
up and down in his solitary valley, safe and satis- 
fied, and rejoices, like Jonah, to imagine the fear- 
ful execution of the sentence of the indignant 
God. 

But by and by the heat begins to creep down 
into the pleasant valley ; little by little the water 
in the brook grows less. The days pass; the 
anxious prophet watches ; at last, u after awhile,” 
the brook dries up. And the drought touches 
Elijah. 

Now here is one of the hardest things to under- 
stand in the hard problem of pain. I mean this 
strange impartiality. If the brook had dried up 
in front of Ahab’s palace, that would have been 
right. We could see plainly enough what that 
was for. But when the brook dries up at the 
feet of the only good man in the whole country, 
that is quite a different matter. “ There was no 
rain in the land,” and that affected Eh j ah’s brook 
just as it affected Ahab’s. Sometimes there is a 
pestilence in the land, and the saint suffers like 
the sinner. All the time there is trouble in the 
land, of one sort or another, and the trouble 
touches the good just as it touches the bad. 
There is no difference. And we wonder why. 


58 


THE DRY BROOK. 


No doubt but Elijah, standing on the bank of the 
dry brook, wondered why. 

We can see why in Elijah’s case. The dry 
brook taught Elijah the lesson of fellowship. 

There he sat apart in his pleasant valley, and 
all the world about him was full of trouble. It 
is not likely that he greatly cared. He was a stern 
man, a preacher of the indignation of an offended 
God. It may even have given him a certain fierce 
joy to think of all that misery. These people had 
sinned, and now they were getting properly pun- 
ished ; and Elijah was glad of it. And he needed 
to be taught better than that. And so the dry 
brook brought him, first of all, out of his satisfied 
seclusion. He had to leave that pleasant valley. 

Trouble comes and makes our old life impossi- 
ble any longer. We have been abiding in some 
pleasant valley, and God summons us out of it. 
The brook dries up, and we cannot go on in the 
old way. Sometimes it seems like the end of all 
that is worth while in life. Probably it is but the 
beginning of a wider living. It is no longer well 
for us to stay in the pleasant valley. God has 
some work for us to do, some help for us to ren- 
der in his service, and we need the closer fellow- 
ship with men which we could never have in the 
secluded valley. That is why the brook dries up. 

Out goes Elijah into the suffering world. 


THE DRY BROOK. 


59 


Hungry and thirsty he takes his journey across 
the country. He knows now what starvation 
means. A great pity begins to take possession 
of his heart. He thinks now about that great 
famine in quite another way, and wants it ended. 
And presently he is standing on the top of Car- 
mel, and looking up into the hot sky, and praying 
God for rain. 

It is essential that whoever would be a helper 
of men must first have fellowship with men. He 
must go out among them and know them. He 
cannot stay apart in any pleasant seclusion, hav- 
ing no experience of the hunger and thirst which 
devour the life of man 5 he must himself bear 
our sicknesses and carry our sorrows. We must 
first love him before he can be of help to us. 
And we can love him only when he first loves us. 
Christ stands supreme in our affection because he 
came out among us, and touched our hands with 
his hands, and did not in any way hold himself 
aloof even from sinners. And because he was 
tempted, he became our helper in temptation. 
Because he suffered with us, he becomes our 
Saviour. 

The brook dries up, and we begin to understand 
what other people suffer. And so we begin to be 
able to help them. There is that blessing in pain 
and trouble, anyhow, that it gives sympathy, and 


60 


THE DRY BROOK. 


fellowship, and understanding. It sends us out 
of the pleasant valley into the world where G-od 
needs us for his work. 

The dry brook taught Ahab the existence of 
God ; but it taught Elijah the existence of man. 


THE BEGINNING OF THE MILLENNIUM. 


“Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: con- 
demn not, and ye shall not be condemned j forgive, 
and ye shall be forgiven ; give, and it shall be 
given unto you ; good measure, pressed down, and 
shaken together, and running over, shall men give 
into your bosom.” 

When nobody any longer judges nor condemns 
his neighbor, and when everybody gives and 
forgives, then we will be living in the beginning 
of the millennium. It needs no argument, in this 
world of busy tongues, to show the advantage of 
such a state as that. All that we want to know is 
how to bring that state of things about. Christ 
tells us that it is possible to drive all unkind 
speech out of the world, and to put generosity 
and forgiveness in the place of it. The millennium 
is possible. But how ? 

We look into the books that give us pictures 
of the twentieth century and offer to guide us 
into the promised land. And the land is fair 


62 THE BEGINNING OF THE MILLENNIUM. 

enough and attractive enough, and a good deal 
of an improvement upon the United States of 
America. But the way over to it is not so plain. 
We will somehow get there, the prophets tell 
us: there will be a social revolution, there will 
be a conquest of the classes by the masses, there 
will be this, that, and the other crisis, catas- 
trophe, blooming out of the new life from the 
old $ and then we will all love one another, and 
the brotherhood of man will be a blessed uni- 
versal reality. The truth is that, while we all 
want the millennium badly enough, nobody is 
quite sure of the way to it. The blind are leading 
the blind, and the end of such leading is pretty 
sure to be a sudden fall into an unexpected 
ditch. 

I have no faith in any dramatic beginning of 
the millennium. I do not believe that the curtain 
of cloud will roll up at the tinkle of any reform- 
er’s bell, and behold, a new heavens and a new 
earth. The millennium is coming, but it is coming 
in very homely, simple ways j not by any orator- 
ical resolution passed in the parliament of man, 
not by any vaccination of the human heart with 
the bacillus of brotherly love, not by might of 
mobs nor strength of arms. 

Christ tells us how the millennium will begin. 
But we listen to him as the Syrian nobleman 


THE BEGINNING OF THE MILLENNIUM. 63 

listened to the Hebrew prophet. The nobleman, 
yon remember, wanted to be cured of his leprosy, 
and he came with his retinue of servants, a 
gorgeous procession, with trumpets and banners, 
he himself riding in the midst in his golden 
chariot 3 and they stopped before the plain house 
where the prophet lived, and the prophet sent 
out word that the best way to get rid of the 
leprosy was to go down and take a good bath in 
the river Jordan j and the nobleman was griev- 
ously offended. He had expected that Elisha 
would come out and bow down before him, and 
pray to heaven, and strike his hand over the place 
and make him whole. Instead of that, he was 
just to wash himself in a muddy little river. 
And then his servants came to him and said, 
u Master, if the prophet had commanded thee to 
do some great thing, wouldst thou not have done 
it? How much more, then, when he bids you 
wash and be clean ! ” And so the nobleman came 
to his right mind, and obeyed, and was cleansed. 

How true that is to human nature ! Here we 
are, praying that the kingdom of God may come, 
and laying plans to convert all men to brotherly 
love, and wondering what is just the best way to 
do that, and studying political economy to find 
out, and imagining some wonderful new legisla- 
tion, or some fine new method of taxation, or 


64 THE BEGINNING OF THE MILLENNIUM. 

some sublime revolution, and not listening to 
what Christ says at all. 

Christ says that if we want to put a stop to 
unkind and unjust judging, we must simply stop 
that sort of judging our own selves. If we would 
not have others condemn us, we must not con- 
demn them. If we want to bring in a revival of 
the spirit of forgiveness, we must ourselves be 
f orgiving. And if we desire a better distribution 
of the good things of life, and want other people 
to give us better measure, we must begin that our 
own selves $ we must ourselves set the standard of 
good measure. That is, as we do, so will others 
do to us. If we do well, others will do well. 
The whole world will become Christian if we are 
Christians. The millennium begins at home. 

That is very plain and slow and homely. It is 
not taken account of in “Looking Backward” or 
in “ News from Nowhere,” or in any of the other 
popular prophecies that I have read. But it is 
the simple truth about the matter. It is the 
narrow way, and the Christian way, and the divine 
way, and the only way, into the promised land. 
There can be no regeneration of society without 
first a regeneration of the individual. There can 
be no human brotherhood except among a com- 
pany of brothers. And you cannot get brotherly 
love by passing laws. 


THE BEGINNING OF THE MILLENNIUM. 65 

Already there is beginning a reaction against 
socialism. The labor unions are making enemies. 
Plain-thinking and clear-headed men are doubt- 
ing whether the millennium is any more likely to 
come along the path of the tyranny of labor than 
along the path of the tyranny of capital. It was 
found, a good while ago, when experiments were 
being tried in ecclesiastical government, that 
“ my lords the brethren ” were even harder mas- 
ters than “my lords the bishops.” And it is 
being found to-day, to the workingman’s sorrow, 
that recent experiments in the regulation of labor 
are resulting in that same sort of discovery. The 
laborer has lost his liberty. How long or how 
short shall be his day, how much or how little 
shall be his wages, whether he shall work at all 
or not, is being absolutely decided for him as if 
he were a child. And if he attempts to assert 
his independence, and to follow his own honest 
will as a man should, his lords the brethren will 
make life miserable for him, they will hoot at him 
in the street and stone him. 

It is not that socialism is at fault, for socialism 
is simply applied Christianity. It is an endeavor 
to set the conditions of human life upon a dis- 
tinctly Christian basis. It is an attempt to bring 
in the millennium. I believe most thoroughly that 
when Christ preached the “kingdom of God” he 


66 THE BEGINNING OF THE MILLENNIUM. 

was thinking not for a moment of the Church as 
an ecclesiastical organization, hut of the social- 
istic state, of the establishment of society on the 
sure foundations of brotherly love. 

But I believe with equal emphasis that there is 
only one way to bring in the socialistic state, and 
that that is not the way of tyranny, but the way 
which Christ taught. You cannot whip men into 
brotherhood j you cannot stone men into fraternal 
love. Brotherhood, yes j all good men standing 
together for the best interests of all, yes 5 bnt 
manhood first. Personal liberty first. The ideal 
brotherhood is not a labor union of machines, 
but a labor union of independent men. 

If socialism means tyranny, then let all lovers 
of liberty oppose it. If the union of labor means 
the stealing of the rights of man, then let all 
friends of humanity do their best to break it. 

No : true socialism means honest and genuine 
and loving brotherhood, and has no use for brick- 
bats. And the union of labor, if it is to go on — 
as God grant it may go on — must proceed along 
the lines which Christ lays down, must persuade 
and not compel, must be a willing union, with 
no hard words and no hard hands, encouraging 
the liberty of all men and paying no court to 
tyranny. “ Give, and it shall be given unto you,” 
must be the formula of its faith and its hope. 


THE BEGINNING OF THE MILLENNIUM. 67 

And u good measure, pressed down, and shaken 
together, and running over” will be its sure 
reward. 

The kingdom of God has no place in the geog- 
raphies. The kingdom of God is in the hearts 
of men. You know how they used to ask Christ 
in the old days, over and over, when the kingdom 
of God should come. But he set no date. For 
the kingdom of God, the millennium, the reign of 
righteousness, begins whenever and wherever any 
man or woman stops uttering unkind judgments 
and uncalled-for condemnations, and begins with 
a new earnestness to give and to forgive. And 
the kingdom of God will fully come, and earth 
will be given another name and be christened 
heaven, on the very day when all the men and all 
the women who live upon it shall have learned 
that lesson of eternal love. 

And so you see it depends, as I said, not upon 
princes, not upon parliaments, not upon saints, 
jiot upon socialists, but just upon our own indi- 
vidual selves when the millennium shall come. 
Not from without, but from within, is reforma- 
tion to be looked for. Not by new laws, but by 
new love, is society to be uplifted, and converted, 
and set right. And you and I must make the be- 
ginning. 

Don’t wait. Don’t look for leaders. Begin 


68 THE BEGINNING OF THE MILLENNIUM. 

yourself. Judge not, and see how soon you will 
stop hearing unkind comments. Condemn not, 
and notice what a new tolerance and charity will 
come into the speech of all who talk with you. 
Forgive, and you shall be forgiven, and your 
example will awaken, though you may not know 
it, a new sense of the possibility of forgiveness. 
Give and it shall be given unto you. Everybody 
you know will begin giving. 

James Freeman Clarke describes in his frag- 
ment of autobiography a journey from Massachu- 
setts to Kentucky in the days before the railroad. 
He noticed, he says, that the tone of a stage- 
coach party often depended upon the temper of a 
single individual. A cross, ill-natured, complain- 
ing fellow would make all the other passengers 
cross, ill-natured, and complaining. “ Once,” he 
says, “when going through the Cattaraugus 
woods, where the road was mostly deep mire or 
rough corduroy and there was every temptation 
to be cross and uncomfortable, one man so 
enlivened and entertained our party, and was so 
accommodating and good-natured that we seemed 
to be having a pleasant picnic, and the other 
inmates of the coach took the same tone. I there- 
fore found it best for my own sake, as soon as 
we took our places in the coach for a long journey, 
to manifest an interest in my fellow-passengers 


THE BEGINNING OF THE MILLENNIUM. 69 

and their comfort* offering, for example, to 
change places with them if they preferred my 
seat to their own, and paying them such little 
attentions as are always agreeable, It happened 
almost always that the other passengers would 
follow this lead, and take pains to be civil and 
accommodating.” Is not that a parable of human 
life? Widen out a stage-coach and you get a 
neighborhood. And set down one individual in 
that neighborhood who tries a good many times 
a day to do what Christ says, and you get a 
glimpse of the millennium. That is how the mil- 
lennium begins. 


THE HOLINESS OF HOLIDAYS. 


“ Come ye yourselves into a desert place, and 
rest awhile.” 

That is, into a deserted place. When we hear 
the word “ desert ” we begin at once to think of 
sand: we think of the desert of Sahara, or of 
that waste tract in Colorado which is just now 
being so singularly changed into a lake. But 
the word here means a deserted place. There 
was no lack of grass in it ; the trees grew there, 
the hills lifted their green heads into the sky; 
but nobody lived there. Christ wanted the disci- 
ples to have a holiday, and his idea of a holiday 
was not to get into a crowd, but to get out of it. 
He proposed that they should go into a place 
where they could be alone. 

The disciples had just come back from a mis- 
sionary journey. They had been going about 
among the village of Galilee, preaching the new 
gospel. And they had come again that they 
might give an account of their good work. They 


THE HOLINESS OF HOLIDAYS. 


71 


gathered themselves together unto Jesus, and 
they told him all things whatsoever they had 
done, and whatsoever they had taught. All the 
discouragements, all the temptations, all the suc- 
cesses and the victories, they rehearsed to him. 
And when they came to the end of their enthusi- 
astic story, Jesus said, Come now and rest; come 
ye yourselves into a desert place and rest awhile. 

The disciples were as busy as a parson and a 
doctor put together. There were so many com- 
ing and going that they had no time, not even 
for their dinners. And Jesus saw that they were 
tired. 

Our Lord was notably attentive to the needs 
of the body. When he saw people hungry he 
wanted to give them something to eat. When 
the wine gave out at the wedding he provided 
more. That, you remember, was the first of the 
miracles, and I need not tell you how it was fol- 
lowed by innumerable others, all with that same 
intention — to make life brighter and happier. 
He went about doing good. He was all the time 
making sick people well, and driving away pain, 
and giving smiles for tears. And these blessed 
deeds were not just for the sake of the soul. 
They were not meant only to persuade attention, 
to win faith, to get a congregation. They were 
not like the bell which they used to ring about 


72 


THE HOLINESS OF HOLIDAYS. 


the streets in the old days to attract hearers to 
the sermon. Very often there was no sermon. 
The Master’s heart was overflowing with divine 
compassion. He wanted everybody to be well 
and happy. He did not care so much for the 
soul that the body was of no consequence to him. 

It is plain, and most significant, that the 
greater part of Christ’s teaching related not to 
the next world, but to this world. He said that 
the whole duty of man is summed up in two com- 
mandments — that we love God, and that we love 
our brother also. And he spent the most of his 
time teaching the second of the two. Take the 
Sermon on the Mount : how little there is in it 
of theology, the science of God, and how much of 
sociology, the science of society ; how entirely it 
is taken up with the divine task of making this 
life better, leaving the next life till we come to 
it. It is a sermon about conduct, about the art 
of living with others, about the social virtues, 
about brotherly love. And then consider the 
parables and the miracles ; see where Christ put 
the emphasis of his blessed teaching. The pur- 
pose that he lived for was to make this planet a 
better place to live in. He came to save us from 
our sins — that is, to help us out of our vices, our 
uglinesses, and our tyrannies, and our mean- 
nesses, and all our unbrotherliness, and to make 


THE HOLINESS OF HOLIDAYS. 


73 


us pleasanter people to live with now. You 
know the list he gave of examination questions 
for admission into heaven — not one of them con- 
taining even a mention of theology: have you 
fed the hungry ? have you visited the sick 1 have 
you cared for the sinner? That shows what 
Christ considered to he the biggest and best part 
of Christianity. He founded the Christian Church 
that it might convert the kingdom of the devil 
into the principality of the Son of God. He 
meant that Christians should be known, not by 
their doctrines about theology, but by their min- 
istrations in society. He said that if heaven is 
ever going to begin for man, here is the place 
and now is the time. u Behold, how these Chris- 
tians love one another ! ” That is what Christ 
wanted everybody in the world to say. 

Christ, I said, taught sociology rather than 
theology. That proportion is reversed, I am 
afraid, in some of the theological seminaries. 
The very name shows it. I have never heard of 
a sociological seminary. The ministers in the 
Christian Church are trained in divinity schools, 
— notice the name again, — not in humanity 
schools. They are taught a score of dead-and- 
buried heresies. They become familiar with a 
ghostly company of obsolete isms. They are 
made at home amidst the metaphysical hair-split* 


74 THE HOLINESS OF HOLIDAYS. 

tings of ancient Oriental synods. And then they 
come out into a world where the most urgent of 
all questions are those which concern the rela- 
tions of living men in modern society. And they 
are about as well fitted to pronounce as they 
ought upon the ethics of these vital questions 
and to bring light into the darkness as the Seven 
Sleepers of Ephesus would be qualified to vote 
upon the tariff. There ought to be a chair of 
sociology in every institution where men are 
being trained to carry on Christ’s work in the 
world. That would help to put the Christian 
emphasis where Christ put it. The endowment 
of such a chair would be one of the most helpful 
uses I can think of for a rich man’s money. 

Christianity means the bettering of common 
life. It has just as much to do with business as 
it has with religion, and six times as much to do 
with week-days as it has with Sunday. It is con- 
cerned with prayer-books, yes j but not any more 
than with pocket-books. 

And yet, listen to this : “ The complaint made 
by American workingmen against the churches 
is that they fail to influence conduct, that they 
fail to impress their fundamental principles upon 
those who give direction to the practical affairs 
of life in the counting-room, in legislative halls, 
and on the bench, although these men profess 


THE HOLINESS OF HOLIDAYS. 


75 


Christianity. Laboring men do not feel that it 
is better for them to work for a Christian than 
for one who denies the obligations of Christianity 
— the outcome of experience has not taught them 
that such is the case; they do not believe that 
church membership on the part of their landlord 
insures just and considerate treatment for his 
tenants ; they do not flock to the merchants who 
acknowledge Christ as their Master, in confidence 
that they will merely on that account receive of 
them honest goods for a fair price ; they do not 
rejoice when they learn that a railway magnate, 
in whose employ thousands of their number stand, 
is regularly attending an orthodox church.” You 
know better than I whether that is true or not. 
And you know just as well as I what Christ would 
say to such a Christianity as that. 

Now the application which I want to make 
to-day of this intimate bearing of genuine Chris- 
tianity upon common life has to do with the holi- 
ness of holidays. Christ took the tired disciples 
out into the country for a holiday. Amidst all 
the great matters which urged themselves upon 
the attention of him who had come to save a 
world, Christ found time and interest to care for 
the bodily needs of his followers. He felt that 
the holiness of holidays was a part of his religion. 

There was nothing especially new in that. God 


76 


THE HOLINESS OF HOLIDAYS. 


himself, setting down ten rales for the well-being 
of the race, set down among them one rale about 
a holiday. He occupied a tenth part of the reve- 
lation and enforcement of the moral law with this 
provision for man’s rest. “And rest awhile,” — 
that is one of the commandments. You know 
that the fourth commandment has in it nothing 
about church-going, nothing about what we com- 
monly call religion. Keep a holy day, it says, but 
the adjective means separate, reserved, — set apart 
a day : that is the meaning of it. Every week, 
set apart one day for rest. You know how in 
the version of the commandment given in Deu- 
teronomy that idea of rest is repeated and empha- 
sized. The Hebrews are reminded of those old 
weary days of slavery. “ You know what it is to 
be tired. Now you are your own masters and I 
want you to rest. One day every week, stop 
work. And give a holiday also to all the men, 
and all the women, and all the cattle that labor 
for you.” Out of every seven days, one day for 
rest. 

Now that sets the minimum of the righteous 
man’s rest. That counts off the number of days 
in a Christian working- week. And I want to say, 
as Christian minister, that every employer of labor 
who works his men more than six days in a week 
breaks the commandment of Almighty God. I 


THE HOLINESS OF HOLIDAYS. 77 

am well aware that there are certain industries 
that must go on, Sunday or no Sunday. I do 
not believe that such a thing is possible, nor even 
desirable, as a total stopping of Sunday work. 
The gripman and the milkman and the minister 
cannot well get rest on Sunday. Well, then, on 
some other day than Sunday. That is the best 
day; but six from seven will leave one all the 
same, though the one be Saturday or Tuesday. 
God who gave the commandments claims for his 
tired children one day out of the seven. 

The Sabbath was made for man. That is what 
the Master said. Out of every week some Sab- 
bath day God made for man. The Sabbath was 
made for the men in your mill. The Sabbath was 
made for the men in your store. The Sabbath 
was made for the women in your kitchen. Re- 
member that there are six days only in a Chris- 
tian working- week. If you require seven, one is 
stolen. Surely there can be such an arrangement 
of work in every righteous man’s business that 
every man in his employ can get off one day 
every week. Fifty-two rest days belong, by sim- 
ple right, to every child of God. And every man 
who carries his Christianity out of church with 
him will make it a matter of conscience that the 
number be complete. 11 Remember that thou keep 
holy the Sabbath day : Six days shalt thou labor 


78 


THE HOLINESS OF HOLIDAYS. 


and do all that thou hast to do, but the seventh 
day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God .” 

Thus much, however, is of obligation. The 
Christian employer of labor, it seems to me, will 
do this and more than this ; because the princi- 
ple on which the Christian lives is that he shall 
love his neighbor as himself. And everybody 
who loves his neighbor as himself wants his 
neighbor not only to have some time for rest, but 
to have some time for the pleasures of life. Peo- 
ple must have rest or else they can’t do your work 
for you. It is in your own interest to have them 
stop work one day in seven ; they will do more 
work the other six. But the Christian employer 
is not occupied entirely in getting all the work 
he can out of his men. For these men are not 
machines, nor “ hands ” only • they are men and 
brothers. And the genuine Christian loves his 
brother. He wants to better his brother. He 
wants to make his brother’s life happier. There 
is no Christian man named Cain. 

I go on, accordingly, to certain applications of 
the Christian principle of the holiness of holidays 
which would bring still more leisure into human 
life than is provided for by one whole Sunday 
every week. 

I am not prepared to say much about the num- 
ber of hours in a working-day. I suppose that 


THE HOLINESS OF HOLIDAYS. 79 

the time will come when it will be possible to 
make eight hours the standard. And it seems to 
me that everybody ought to want that time to 
come, because that will mean that the working- 
man has a chance to do something besides work. 
After all, we were not made to spend our lives in 
a treadmill. The spirit of the Christian religion 
puts it into the heart of every Christian employer 
to give his men just as much time for their own 
use as can be given. Money is a great thing, but 
a Christian does not care half so much for money 
as he does for men. I must say that seventeen 
hours for a working-day is only another descrip- 
tion of mere slavery. You might as well propose 
to buy a man, body and soul. I do not under- 
stand how any Christian can be willing, for any 
amount of gain, to accept such an utter sacrifice 
of his brother’s life. 

I am glad to see an extension of interest in the 
Saturday half -holiday. It has got into the gov- 
ernment offices and into the wholesale houses and 
into the banks, and I hope that there will be no 
stopping till it touches every mill and every shop 
in the whole country. They have won this re- 
form in England. Men work fifty-four hours in 
the week in that enterprising country. And no 
poverty appears to threaten industry over there. 
The whole nation is better for that extra leisure. 


80 


THE HOLINESS OF HOLIDAYS. 


Somehow the stores seem to keep open on this 
side of the ocean. But we can remedy that, if we 
will. It is certain that there can be no selling if 
there is no buying. The only reason for keeping 
tired clerks away from the green parks is that 
they may wait on customers. The shops will 
close quick enough if the shop-keepers are mak- 
ing no money. And so the people have the mat- 
ter in their own hands. If we believe as Christ 
did in caring for the bodies of men, if we want 
everybody who needs a rest to get at least that 
much of a rest, you know that we can make a be- 
ginning by keeping a Saturday half -holiday our- 
selves. Don’t buy anything on Saturday after- 
noon. 

A good many reformers need nothing but a 
little thoughtfulness — that is, a little more applied 
Christianity. The grocery stores, I understand, 
are kept open very late on Saturday for the ac- 
commodation of thoughtless people, so that the 
grocers’ clerks get not so much as a Saturday 
evening holiday. And then they miss church on 
Sunday. 

Finally, I want to say something about the 
Christian duty of taking a vicarious vacation. 
This is now the season when a good many fort- 
unate people are beginning, in at least one re- 
spect, to imitate the twelve apostles: they are 


THE HOLINESS OF HOLIDAYS. 


81 


going out into the country to “rest awhile.” 
This is the time to think about vacation. Now, 
why not take a vicarious vacation ? By that I do 
not mean, Why not let somebody take your vaca- 
tion for you ? but Why not get somebody else to 
share your vacation with you ? Becaue s you are 
going, make it possible for some one else to go. 

For it happens sometimes — yes, a great deal of 
the time ! — that those who need the country most 
are the least able to get a glimpse of it. It is not 
out of the courts and alleys, not out of the fourth 
stories of the tenement-houses, that the summer 
tourists come. But that is where the people live 
who need the sight of the hills and the smell of 
the sea. And a vicarious vacation will mean a 
part of your vacation shared with them. Don’t 
go off and forget the weary mothers and the sick 
babies who cannot go. Don’t be content to take 
a vacation without helping also to give a vaca- 
tion. 

There might easily be more of this vicarious 
vacation, of this fraternal, this Christian holiday, 
than there is. Charitable societies in most cities 
arrange every summer to provide holidays for the 
children of the poor. If no other way of sharing 
your vacation seems better to you, this is a good 
way : send five dollars to this excellent society to 
help in this Christian work. 


82 


THE HOLINESS OF HOLIDAYS. 


Come ye yourselves apart into some country 
place and rest awhile, Christ said. Let us do 
more than listen ; let us repeat that gracious and 
fraternal invitation. 


MONEY FOR MEN. 


“ I will make a man more precious than fine 
gold, even a man than the golden wedge of 
Ophir ” 

That is written in the pages of Isaiah’s book, 
but Isaiah never said it. The scholars who trans- 
lated that chapter in the year 1611 thought that 
that was what Isaiah said. But the scholars who 
translated it over again in the year 1884 say that 
what Isaiah really wrote was this : u I will make 
man more rare than fine gold.” 

The preacher was promising a day of trouble 
for great Babylon. “ Behold,” he cried, u the day 
of the Lord cometh, cruel both with wrath and 
fierce anger, to lay the land desolate.” And 
then he came to the very abyss and extremity 
of their desolation. Bad enough to have the 
land shorn of its harvests, and all the standing 
grain trampled under the feet of war-horses ,* bad 
enough to have the consuming fire lay hold upon 
its houses 5 bad enough to have pride turned into 


84 


MONEY FOR MEN. 


shame, and wealth into poverty, and power into 
captivity. All that was had enough. But thus 
far hope was left, for men were left. Leave us 
men and we may live. Leave us men and you 
may do your worst: the day will pass, and to- 
morrow we will repair the damage, and begin 
over again, and get our revenge upon you yet. 
But there shall be no men. The widows and the 
fatherless children shall search about the ruined 
streets, and a man shall be as rare a sight 
as a purse of gold. “I will make a man more 
precious than fine gold, even a man than the 
golden wedge of Ophir.” That was what Isaiah 
said. 

“ I will make a man more precious than fine 
gold.” I will so bring it about that a man shall 
be of more value than a bar of gold. I will make 
men love their brother-men more than they love 
their money. Isaiah never said that; but God 
said it, and says it still. This is a sentence out 
of the Word of God. Isaiah said a great many 
things in his day, and is dead. But God is not 
dead. And God says this to-day. In the Bible 
or out of the Bible, this is the voice of God. 
This word is true with all the truth of God 
Almighty. 

On one side a man, on the other side a bar of 
gold. On one side a man, on the other side a 


MONEY FOR MEN. 


85 


herd of swine. That, you remember, was at Ga- 
dara, beyond the Lake of Galilee. Christ had 
healed a poor man there who had a whole legion 
of devils in possession of him, and somehow that 
healing had involved the loss of a large herd of 
swine. Down they had rushed over a steep place 
into the sea, and that was the end of the swine, — 
but it was the beginning of the man. And then 
the owners came. And when they came they 
altogether overlooked the man. They paid no 
heed to this their brother clothed and in his 
proper mind, made all over new. Their eyes 
were a-search for swine. They had lost two 
thousand head of swine ! And they requested 
Jesus to depart out of their coasts as speedily as 
possible. 

I will make a man more precious than a herd 
of swine, or than a purse of gold, or than the 
golden wedge of Ophir. There is no question as 
to Christ’s comparative valuation of a man and 
money. Men were not for money, in his estima- 
tion, but money for men. 

There was an interesting discussion going on 
some time ago as to the best uses for money. Mr. 
Carnegie began it; Mr. Gladstone and Cardinal 
Manning and Cardinal Gibbons contributed to it ; 
Mr. Phelps and Bishop Potter were the last speak- 
ers. How to persuade rich men to spend money 


86 


MONEY FOR MEN. 


in the right way and what precisely is the right 
way of spending money were the main points 
under consideration. 

Do you not see how the text touches the heart 
of the whole matter? saying to the rich man, 
Your brother is more precious than your bank- 
account. Is it not plain that, if a man once gets 
that well into his heart, there need be no further 
fear about that man ? Henceforth his supreme 
interest is in the men about him. Perhaps he 
has a great army of them in his mill, or a regi- 
ment of them in his store, or a company of them 
in his office. He wants to help those men. He 
will spend his money — there is no need to per- 
suade a man to spend his money for that which 
interests him — and he will spend his money well. 
A man who is interested is going to advance his 
interests. You may trust him for that. This 
man cannot help spending his money. Spend it f 
Why, he will spend it just as he eats his dinner. 
The purpose of a dinner is to be eaten, and the 
purpose of money is to be spent. He will spend 
his money, and spend it in the right way. 

The text sets the emphasis, not on money, but 
on men. And that is Christianity. That is what 
the Master taught. 

Remember how there came to him that rich 
young man, that good young man. Good ? he was 


MONEY FOR MEN. 


87 


an example for church-members. All the com- 
mandments had he kept from his youth up. An 
estimable young man, always at church, always 
well-conducted. What lacked he yet ? At once 
Christ tested him. What did he think of money 
and of men ? On the one side money, on the other 
side men. Come, now, which do you care for most ? 
in which are you really interested most ? Take 
your money and go spend it in helping men. But 
you know that the young man did not do that. 
He made the great refusal. He went home and 
added up his bank-account. His fine gold was 
more precious than a man. 

What we all need, whether we have great pos- 
sessions or small possessions, is to be interested in 
men. The part of a Christian man or a Christian 
woman is to set about making somebody’s life 
better. I believe that preaching does some good. 
Somebody has compared it to dashing a lot of 
water over a collection of narrow-necked vessels : 
a drop or two gets in. But I know that the most 
good is done when the preacher goes down out of 
the pulpit, and talks quietly and privately and per- 
sonally to one man or one woman. I believe, too, 
that some good is done by the general distribu- 
tion of charity, by putting money into church 
alms basins, and writing figures in subscription 
lists. But I know that the best good is got at 


88 


MONEY FOR MEN. 


when one helps one; when a man goes to his 
neighbor and gets acquainted with him, and be- 
comes his personal friend, and sympathizes with 
him, and uplifts him. You won’t have to go very 
far to find somebody who is worse off than you 
are. Take that somebody up. Interest yourself 
in that unhappy life. Perhaps it will take money ; 
perhaps it will take time; perhaps it will take 
yourself. Give yourself, anyhow, and as much 
else as you need to. But, above all, be gener- 
ously interested. What men and women want is 
honest interest, real, human, brotherly and sis- 
terly interest. They look into your eyes as you 
take their hand, and they read there whether 
to you a man is more precious than fine gold 
or not. 

There is no need to bring forward proof to con- 
vince people that the man who has the strongest 
hand to-day to reach out and pull up those who 
are down is the man who owns a million dollars. 
There is no end to what that man can do. At 
the same time it is evident to everybody, upon the 
plain statement of the fact, that the man who 
has actually done the most for men, been the su- 
preme benefactor, and the pre-eminent reformer, 
and the most availing uplifter of all history, was 
really one of the poorest men that ever lived, and 
had not where to lay his head. He came out of 


MONEY FOR MEN. 


89 


a carpenter's shop, and had not an extra dollar in 
his pocket all his life long. You do not need to 
be rich to be a helper. You only need to be in- 
terested with all your heart. But if you do have 
money, oh, what miracles you can do with it ! 

One of the most helpful people of my acquaint- 
ance lives in a back street, in an unpleasant 
neighborhood, in a small house. Everybody in 
that neighborhood knows her, and she knows 
them and their children. They go to her with 
their troubles and she gives them her sympathy. 
As for money, she would give that too if she had 
any to give. She gives herself. The whole street 
is better because she lives on it. But if she had 
the means which some have, what would she do, 
I wonder? Would she fall before the tempta- 
tion of a comfortable life ? Would she get, per- 
haps, to thinking that because she had plenty of 
butter on her bread so had everybody else ? and 
because she was contented, all the mutterings of 
discontented people were but needless grum- 
blings ? Anyhow, it is true that the kindest, most 
thoughtful, most helpful people, quickest to bear 
the hardest inconveniences for a neighbor, readi- 
est to lift up those that are down, are the poor. 

It is not your money that we want so much as 
your interest. We want your own personal, hand- 
to-hand and heart-to-heart endeavor. Do you not 


90 


MONEY FOR MEN. 


remember in the old story how Elisha sent his 
servant with his staff to bring back life to the 
dead, and the servant and the staff were no good 
at all ? the dead stayed dead. And then he came 
himself, and the still heart began to beat. We 
want you to come yourself. Don’t send your 
servant ! Don’t send anything ! Come yourself ! 

“ Who gave himself.” That is the secret of the 
power of Jesus Christ over the hearts of men to- 
day. He went about taking men by the hand and 
lifting them up. Jesus Christ was more inter- 
ested in men than he was in anything else on 
earth or in heaven. He cared not for reputation, 
cared not for the comforts of a sheltered life, 
cared not for money, cared not for himself, but he 
did care for men. And he loved us and gave 
himself for us. 

The best use that can be made of money is to 
use it for the uplifting of men. If extravagant 
dinners will uplift men, give extravagant dinners. 
If elaborate dresses will really help anybody, or- 
der elaborate dresses. Mr. Phelps says that rich 
men are helping poor men when they give them 
employment manufacturing luxuries. We must 
be somewhat suspicious, however, of this pleasant 
way of helping others by helping ourselves. But 
money is for men : that is the whole sermon in a 
sentence. Money is for men : not men for money. 


MONEY FOR MEN. 


91 


Any use of money which makes better men is a 
good use. The Christian capitalist is not so 
much interested in getting all he can out of his 
men as he is in getting all he can into them. Fine 
gold is precious because we can make use of it in 
the upbuilding of a man. 


WHAT A BLIND MAN SAW. 


“ And he looked up and said, I see men ; for I 
behold them as trees, walking ” That is what a 
blind man saw. 

The man was blind — like the rest of ns. We 
may have better eyes than he had ; but we do not 
see with our eyes. Everybody knows that. We 
see with our minds. The mind looks out through 
the lens of the eye as through a glass, and so sees. 
Of course we need eyes. But how much we see 
with our eyes depends upon the seeing mind. 
Every summer crowds of people go over to see 
Europe, but what they see is limited by what 
they know. The most expert oculist cannot make 
a dull mind see. There was a wise man in the 
old time who put out both his eyes, and even then 
saw more than everybody else in all Greece. It 
is the mind that sees. 

And when we come to think of sight as mind- 
seeing, we cannot escape the confession of blind- 
For clear seeing means clear thinking. 



WHAT A BLIND MAN SAW. 93 

And who will claim the prize for that 1 We are 
all brothers of the blind man. 

This blind man, who at first saw nothing but a 
universal blackness, presently got his eyes half 
open. And Christ said, “ Do you see anything ? ” 
And the man answered, “ I see men j for I behold 
them as trees, walking.” 

He saw men, and he was quite sure that they 
were men because he saw them walking about like 
trees ! Whether the men looked to him like trees, 
or the trees seemed to him to be walking about 
like men, it would be hard to say. But it is evi- 
dent what a hazy, blundering vision he had. 

We can see better than that. We can tell a man 
from a tree. Anyhow, we think we can. But 
can we ? Is that sure 1 

Is it not true, now, that a man is more of a man 
if he owns a tree ? Suppose he owns a hundred 
trees, and a great green acre of smooth lawn in 
the shadow of them ; suppose that he has got a 
lot of big trees together, and built himself a fine 
house out of them, is he not more of a man on 
that account ? And so, is not a tree a part of a 
man ? Does it not go to the making of manhood ? 
Ought we not to regard him as the first among 
men who possesses the most trees ? 

You will not say that, nor will I. We know 
better than that. We know very well that not 


94 


WHAT A BLIND MAN SAW. 


what a man has, but what he is, makes him more 
of a man or less of a man, and settles his real 
station in the company of men. We know that 
character means manhood, and that the best man 
is the best man, and that trees have nothing to 
do with it. We do not mistake trees for men. 
But can we say as much for all our neighbors ? 
Is that the common way of estimating men ? 

Look closely at this blind man of Bethsaida, 
and see if you do not know him. Is not his 
name Society? 

What this blind man needs is that Christ shall 
touch him, and set his eyes wide open, so that he 
may know a man when he looks at him. Aris- 
tocracy is an abiding characteristic of human 
life. It has always existed; it exists every- 
where ; and it will continue on into the world to 
come. For the aristocrats are simply the best. 
That is what the word means. And there will 
always be the best. There will never arrive a 
day when we shall all be perfectly equal saints 
and heroes. But best in what ? The ideal aris- 
tocracy — who shall belong to it ? Sometimes it 
has been made up of the men with the stoutest 
muscles; sometimes of the descendants of the 
oldest settlers; sometimes of people with the 
fullest pocket-books. But Christ leaves no doubt 
as to the ideal aristocracy. Society, looking 


WHAT A BLIND MAN SAW. 


95 


about with open eyes and clear vision to choose 
its best, will base its choice not upon any of these 
conditions. Christ cared not for strength, except 
for strength of character. It mattered not to 
him though a man’s great-grandfather were the 
patriarch Abraham. And he loved the poor man 
just as much as he loved the rich man. Look at 
the men whom Christ chose as the actual aris- 
tocracy in his own ideal commonwealth. The 
twelve apostles were selected not even for their 
wisdom, but simply for their devotion to their 
Master. They were men who gladly followed 
Christ. They were the friends of Christ. 

The Bible makes short work of conventional 
aristocracies. The proudest prince gets no praise 
in that impartial and just history if he were a 
man who followed not the will of God. The 
standard of approbation in the Bible is the rule 
of righteousness. And when Society looks out 
of dim eyes no longer, but sees with clear vision, 
touched by the healing hand of Christ, then he 
will have praise and welcome who brings man- 
hood with him; Christian manhood and Chris- 
tian womanhood will stand for more than titled 
birth or bank account. There will no longer be 
any doubt as to the identity of a man. 

One of the most important advantages of sight 
is that it gives a knowledge of difference. It 


96 


WHAT A BLIND MAN SAW. 


makes it possible for us to distinguish between a 
man and a tree. And this knowledge of differ- 
ence is one of the most useful pieces of informa- 
tion that anybody can have. Because it tells us 
what is valuable and what is not. We know 
what things are really worth. And that is the 
beginning of all sorts of success. 

A large part of the battle of life has been 
fought and gained when one has learned the dif- 
ference between a man and a tree. For that is 
the difference between the great and the small, 
between mind and matter, between the eternal 
and the transitory, between earth and heaven. 
Success begins with a recognition of the values 
of things. It is conditioned upon a sense of pro- 
portion. Nobody ever made a fortune who ex- 
pended any considerable amount of “ five-dollar 
time” upon “fifty-cent jobs.” Nobody ever suc- 
ceeded who habitually mistook small things for 
great, or great things for small. 

Look again at this blundering blind man. Is 
not his name the Church ? 

This, anyhow, is exactly what the Church is 
doing, — making a mistaken valuation, reading 
life with a wrong emphasis, setting small things 
in the place of great things. Some people think 
that the adoption of colored book-marks is a sign 
of the advance of true religion. A vested choir 


WHAT A BLIND MAN SAW. 


97 


is a regiment enlisted against the armies of the 
devil. The growth of ritnal is a growth of right- 
eousness. Other people think that these things 
are earthly, sensual, and of the pit. The mischief 
is in caring about these things at all. What the 
Church wants is men. All else is utterly subor- 
dinate. To teach the truth of God, and to get 
people where they can take the hand of Christ, — 
this is what the Church exists to do. Christ looks 
straight into the eyes of men. What does he care 
about the color of the leaves in the tree over his 
head ? It is only the blind man who mixes men 
up with trees, and cannot tell which is which. 
The whole question of ritual, the whole discussion 
as to the cut and color of the parson’s clothes, is 
nothing but a blind man’s blunder. 

There are few hindrances which offer worse ob- 
struction to the progress of Christianity than the 
dissensions of Christians. And if you will think 
what these dissensions are about, you will see that 
they are about very small things indeed. Some 
people say that the rest of us are not good Chris- 
tians because we sing “psalms and hymns and 
spiritual songs,” instead of singing the psalms 
only, in Francis Rouse’s version. Some people 
say that the rest of us are not Christians at all, 
and have never been baptized, because we have 
not been baptized according to a certain peculiar 


98 


WHAT A BLIND MAN SAW. 


ritual. Now it is a particular musical instrument 
which makes discord in the Christian congrega- 
tion. Again, it is the necessity of inserting a cer- 
tain word in the constitution of the United States. 
Shall the Christian man belong to a secret soci- 
ety ? Shall the Christian man cast his Christian 
vote ? After what pattern shall the ideal Chris- 
tian Church be organized and governed f In our 
way, say the Anglicans ; in our way, say the Ro- 
manists ) in our way, say the Presbyterians ; in 
our way, say the Baptists. Down in the south- 
ern counties of this State the number of but- 
tons which a man shall wear on his coat is a 
matter of religion. Over in Russia, the number 
of fingers which the priest shall hold up when 
he pronounces the benediction is a matter of 
religion. 

Mint, anise, and cummin ! These are the things 
about which we cannot agree. We are at one in 
the essentials. We can say the Apostles’ Creed 
together. But we fight each other when we ought 
to be fighting the enemy, because our different 
regiments wear different regimentals. Blind! 
blind ! The Christian Church is a mighty giant. 
There is no end to its strength and its power, and 
no limit to the possibilities of its victory over the 
world, the flesh, and the devil. But the giant is 
blind, and cannot tell the difference between a 


WHAT A BLIND MAN SAW. 


99 


man and a tree, between the little and the big. 
And the giant is breaking twigs when he ought 
to be uplifting nations. 

Christ healed a great many people in the years 
of his blessed ministry, but the writers of the gos- 
pels seem especially fond of telling us how he 
opened the eyes of the blind. For that is one of 
the sacramental miracles. Beneath the outward 
gesture and deed lies the spiritual meaning. We 
are all more or less blind. We are all feeling 
our way about in the haze, not seeing anything 
clearly, and often making blunders, taking men 
for trees. And Christ came to be the life of the 
world. He came to open our blind eyes, and 
to show us what things are, — to teach us the 
eternal difference between men and trees. 

It is all very well to talk about the shortcom- 
ings of society and the faults of the Church, but 
we must remember that there is no such thing as 
abstract society, nor an abstract Church. These 
names mean us. Society means all of us con- 
sidered socially. The Church means all of us 
considered ecclesiastically. Every time we are 
counted in. Society is blind, and the Church is 
blind, because you and I do not see as clearly as 
we might. 

Look once more at this mistaken blind man. 
Is there not a certain familiarity in the features 


100 WHAT A BLIND MAN SAW. 

of his face? Where have we looked into his 
blind eyes before ? Ah ! in our own mirror. 

I know a great many people, and could set 
down their names and residences on a sheet of 
paper, and would only hesitate about the stop- 
ping place, who are as blind as that blind man 
was at Bethsaida. They are taking the small 
things in life to be the great things. They are 
very busy, day after day, in caring for what con- 
cerns their bodily comfort; they are neglecting 
their souls. At least, I infer that they are neg- 
lecting their souls. I would not say that church- 
going is an essential duty of Christian life. There 
is scarcely anything about it in the Christian 
Scriptures. But church-going is a pretty sure 
test of the Christian life. I have never known 
anybody about whose real Christianity I was cer- 
tain who did not want to go to church. And 
when I see people busy and interested on Satur- 
day, and busy and interested on Monday, and in- 
visible and asleep on Sunday, I take it that that 
means something. And I know not what it means 
unless it is that these Sunday sleepers are forget- 
ting that they have any soul. 

My friends, if there are any of you within reach 
of these words, — honestly now, what are you 
doing for your souls ? I know pretty well what 
you are doing for your minds, and what you are 


WHAT A BLIND MAN SAW. 101 

doing for your business, and what you are doing 
for your pleasure. But you have a soul; you 
know that. And your soul is the most valuable 
possession that you have ; is it not ? This alone, 
of all that makes up your life, will determine your 
eternal future. And your soul needs care 5 does 
it not ? Your body does, your business does, your 
mind does. The soul must grow, left to itself, 
like a tree. If you do not care for your soul, 
your soul will simply go on in the way of all 
things that are uncared for: it will die. And 
you will lose your soul. 

There is a great difference between a man and a 
tree, and the largest part of the difference is in 
the fact that a man has a soul, while a tree has 
only trunk and branches. But there are always 
people blind enough to miss that. Somehow, it 
takes clear sight on the part of all of us to see 
that distinctly, and really to get it into our un- 
derstanding. To set the emphasis on great things 
rather than on small things, to value the spiritual 
side of life at its right valuation, to keep the king- 
dom of God and his righteousness first and fore- 
most every day we live, is the order of things 
with all people who know a man from a tree. 


THE BRETHREN AND THE BROTHER- 
HOOD. 


There is a great difference between loving the 
brethren and loving the brotherhood. St. Peter, 
writing his first epistle, commends his Christian 
disciples in the first chapter because they love the 
brethren j in the second chapter he exhorts them 
to love the brotherhood. The brotherhood is the 
society of the brethren. The brotherhood is the 
Church. 

One of the notable contrasts between the apos- 
tles Peter and Paul, and their successors, the 
popes, the prelates, and the presbyters, is their 
attitude toward the Church. The New Testa- 
ment takes but little account of institutions. So 
indefinite is the New-Testament record of the dis- 
cipline, the worship, and the government of the 
apostolic company of Christians that the Roman- 
ist, the Episcopalian, the Presbyterian, the Baptist 
can each say, “My way is the old way ’ 7 5 and 
each one can support his claim by excellent argu- 


THE BRETHREN AND THE BROTHERHOOD. 103 

ments out of the same Scriptures. The truth is 
that nobody knows what the old way was. It is 
as lost as the old table and the old chairs in the 
upper room in which the Church began. Just 
how St. Paul set things in order at Corinth, no 
man can say. Probably St. Paul was guided on 
that occasion, and on most other occasions, by 
the principle of opportunism. He did that which 
the opportunity demanded. He was a great deal 
more concerned with getting the truths of the 
Christian religion into the hearts and lives of men 
than he was with any particular way of doing it. 
Any way to help men ! Any way to save the 
souls or' men ! St. Paul cared more for the 
brethren than he did for the brotherhood. 

On the other hand, there were some people in 
Jerusalem, as there have been a great many peo- 
ple in a great many places since, who seemed to 
think that men ought to be helped only in the 
one old way. Whoever would be saved must keep 
the law of Moses. Really, I suppose, they believed 
that nothing else would effectually help men. 
They laid such emphasis, however, on the old 
way that the supreme purpose of religion seemed 
to be not so much to make people better as to 
make them better by a particular process. No- 
body had any business to be good in any other 
way. To bring in any new method was to en- 


104 THE BRETHREN AND THE BROTHERHOOD. 

danger the whole system of religion. These 
people wanted to furnish the chancels of all the 
Christian churches with a table and a set of 
chairs made exactly like those which had stood 
at Pentecost on the floor of the upper room. 
They were against any man who suggested that, 
although that furniture answered excellently for 
Jerusalem, something else might do better for 
Alexandria or Rome. These people insisted that 
all “ fishers of men ” ought to use the same sort 
of bait and tackle that was used in the year one. 
Paul must fish at Athens just as Peter fished at 
Capernaum. The methods of the Lake of Galilee 
must be the methods of the Mediterranean. This 
way of looking at things set the emphasis upon 
the old precedents, attributed great importance 
to the established customs of the Christian soci- 
ety, elevated the brotherhood over the brethren. 

These two ideas about religion have contended 
from the beginning. 

You remember how the apostles found a man 
one day who was doing their work, and doing it 
more successfully than they were, but not accord- 
ing to their method. This man followed not with 
them. He loved the brethren, he loved every 
brother in the street. He wanted to help all who 
needed help, and he did help them in the name of 
J esus. But for some reason he seems not to have 


THE BRETHREN AND THE BROTHERHOOD. 105 

loved the brotherhood. He had no connection 
with the brotherhood. And the brotherhood did 
not like that. They forbade the man. They said 
that all that good work of casting out devils in 
the Master’s name belonged to them. That was 
the brotherhood’s business. They put a stop to 
that beneficent ministry. They were quite willing 
to let the brethren go on being vexed with devils, 
for the sake of the brotherhood. 

It was about this matter that dissension arose 
in the days of the apostles between the Jewish and 
the Gentile converts. The Jews were not willing 
to relax the regulations of the religious society to 
meet the new conditions. Instead of going out 
with hands extended to welcome every Gentile 
brother who desired to take Christ for his teacher 
they stayed back, reflecting that such an invitation 
would be inconsistent with the customs of the 
brotherhood. And when Paul and Peter received 
these brethren, and brought them by a new way 
into the brotherhood, and men began to become 
Christians without ever being Jews at all, these 
conservative people were indignant. Peter lost 
the presidency of the Church at Jerusalem ; Paul 
was complained about, called a heretic, hindered 
in his work, and persecuted. This was the first 
Christian controversy. It was the occasion of the 
calling of the first Christian council. That was 


106 THE BRETHREN AND THE BROTHERHOOD. 

what they talked about there at Jerusalem: 
should their first care be about the brotherhood, 
that is, about the keeping of the old customs ? or 
should their first care be about the brethren, that 
is, about the saving of the souls of all men in any 
way? 

The question was decided at Jerusalem in favor 
of the brethren. The mind of the apostolic 
Church, as then expressed, was for setting the 
salvation of the individual above the preservation 
of any ancient custom. It was settled that the 
brotherhood existed for the brethren, not the 
brethren for the brotherhood. Nevertheless the 
thought of the Church for centuries ran in the 
other channel. The great work was the build- 
ing of an institution, the strengthening and elab- 
orating of an ecclesiastical organization. To 
erect stupendous buildings, to maintain a splen- 
did ceremonial, to gain money, and to get power, 
were the undertakings which largely occupied the 
mediaeval churchmen. Then came the Reforma- 
tion. The Reformation was that old Jerusalem 
council over again. The question once more 
came up for settlement — which is the more im- 
portant, the soul or the Church, the brethren or 
the brotherhood ? The supreme purpose of the 
Reformation was to readjust the broken balance. 
They took away the emphasis from the federal 


THE BRETHREN AND THE BROTHERHOOD. 107 

idea in religion, and set it on the individual idea. 
They taught that the soul of one man is worth 
more than all the ecclesiastical organization in 
the world. Perish the brotherhood if it hinder 
the brethren ! 

The Reformation, however, was not by any 
means an unqualified success. That, indeed, 
could hardly be expected. The Reformation was 
a reaction, and a reaction is a fall from one ex- 
treme to another. It is an endeavor to get a 
more accurate measure by taking all the weights 
out of one side of the scale and putting them on 
the other. The immediate result of the Reforma- 
tion was anarchy. The brethren were now in the 
ascendant ; the old brotherhood was abandoned ; 
every brother did what was right in his own eyes. 
The world was filled with confusion. A hundred 
strange doctrines followed the unguided readings 
of untrained theologians in the pages of the Bible, 
and a hundred fanatical sects arose to represent 
them. Every man who even fancied that he had 
discovered a new truth got his friends and his 
neighbors together, and formed as many of them 
as he could persuade to follow him into a new 
u Church.” 

Along with this went, in some places, a for- 
saking of the ten commandments, and in other 
places a rejection of the Christian creed. Men 


108 THE BRETHREN AND THE BROTHERHOOD. 

proposed to have no authority over them what- 
ever. The standard of faith, the standard of mor- 
als, was to be new constructed by every individ- 
ual out of the Bible. All the old traditions, the 
old ways, the old interpretations were to go for 
nothing. The Christian religion had been asleep 
or dead for sixteen hundred years. And now 
every man was an apostle. The old despotism 
was followed by the dismemberment of Christen- 
dom: the old superstition was followed by the 
new skepticism. And these evils continue to the 
present day. 

Thus the Christian world was divided, and is 
divided still, into two opposing camps, protestant 
and catholic, each of them representing one of 
these contending ideas of religion. The underly- 
ing principle of protestantism is the exaltation of 
the brethren above the brotherhood ; the under- 
lying principle of Catholicism is the exaltation of 
the brotherhood above the brethren. 

Both are right, and wrong. Each needs the 
other. The love of the brotherhood divorced 
from the love of the brethren will always lead to 
superstition, to an undue reverence for form and 
custom, to some sort of tyranny. The love of 
the brethren separated from the love of the 
brotherhood will always minister to foolish di- 
visions, to confusion of faith, to ecclesiastical 


THE BRETHREN AND THE BROTHERHOOD. 109 

anarchy. Catholicism is not the right religion j 
protestantism is not the right religion. W e ought 
to be catholic protestants and protestant catho- 
lics. We ought never to be satisfied until we are 
just as protestant and just as catholic as St. Peter 
and St. Paul. St. Peter, who said, “Love the 
brotherhood,” said also, “ Love as brethren.” St. 
Paul, whose characteristic doctrine of justifica- 
tion by faith is the great doctrine in the prot- 
estant creed, had more to say than any other 
New-Testament writer about the Church. 

We ought to love the brethren. Religion is 
for men. The mission of the Church is to help 
everybody who needs help. There is constant 
need of humanizing the work of the Church, that 
is, of emphasizing the supreme purpose for which 
the Church exists, — to make the world better. 
The test of any method, of any custom in the 
Church, is not its age, but its actual usefulness. 
That ministry, for example, is a valid ministry 
which succeeds in saving souls. That organiza- 
tion is the best which can show the best results. 
In the Church, as everywhere else, the proof of 
the tree is in the fruit. We ought to welcome 
every innovation, every new idea, in proportion 
to its attractive influence. The Church is meant 
to bring the life of Jesus Christ to the knowledge 
of every man in the world. The Church is set to 


110 THE BRETHREN AND THE BROTHERHOOD. 

teach the great truths that he taught, and to get 
all people to believe them. Every endeavor to 
make that life more real and that truth more true 
to men has a right place in the Church. The 
Church ought to be big enough to take in all the 
brethren. There ought to be no need for any- 
body who loves the Lord Jesus Christ and wants 
to lead others into the light of that love, to go out 
of the Church to do it. Somehow, in the great 
reunited Church of the future, every sort of wor- 
ship, every variety of ecclesiastical organization, 
every kind of method, every kind of man, will 
have a place. There will be room in it for the 
mistaken people. There will be room in it for 
the men of one idea. There will be room in it 
for all the brethren, and for all who love the 
brethren. The only ones who will have to stay 
j out will be those who are not good enough Chris- 
tians to tolerate differences. In the Church of the 
future, in which men will care more for souls than 
they will for systems, and in which the love and 
service of the Lord Jesus Christ will be the begin- 
ning and the middle and the end of religion, there 
will be a great deal of affirmation, but a great 
scarcity of negation. People will be content to 
set forth what they actually believe, without pro- 
nouncing condemnation on those who believe 
other than that. There will be no effort to force 


THE BRETHREN AND THE BROTHERHOOD. Ill 

faith. There will he such thorough confidence in 
the divinity of truth that truth will be left to pre- 
vail in its own way and in its own time, without 
the assistance of intolerance. 

On the other hand, while we ought to love the 
brethren, we ought also to love the brotherhood. 
It is Christ himself who directs us to hear the 
Church. The customs of the ancient society, the 
ways of the Church, ought not to be readily laid 
aside. The probability is that the brotherhood is 
wiser than any of the brethren. The established 
order is the growth of long experience. It is the 
result of dealing for centuries with human nature. 
These ways have been found helpful. They have 
been tried and proved. The chances are that they 
are the best ways that can be discovered. Wel- 
come, indeed, all new ways, if they are better 
ways. Let us not be so committed to a system 
as to deny all possibility of betterment. To get 
a good work done is what we want, not to get it 
done in any particular way, even the most vener- 
able. Nevertheless, until the new has shown its 
superiority, the old is better. 

W e ought to be loyal to the Church. W e ought, 
as St. Peter says, to love the Church. The cus- 
toms of the Church ought to be as dear to us as 
the customs of the family. We ought to try to 
learn all that we can about the Church, its history. 


112 THE BRETHREN AND THE BROTHERHOOD. 

its interpretations of doctrine, its ways of helping 
people, its place in Christendom. I am sorry for 
anybody who belongs to a sect, whose member- 
ship is in a little, narrow, exclusive religious 
society which was established for the emphasizing 
of some one fragment of Christian doctrine, or 
for the sake of protesting against some old de- 
parture from the truth. I am sorry for anybody 
who cannot be enthusiastic about his Church, 
who does not honestly believe that it is the very 
Church itself, that Christ was the actual founder 
of it, and the apostles the first ministers j and 
that there is room in it for the whole circumfer- 
ence of Christian truth, and that all Christians of 
all names can find in it all that is best in each of 
their denominational positions, and a great deal 
more. Something is the matter, either with the 
Church or with the Christian, when the Christian 
does not love the Church. 


THE SIMPLICITY OF RELIGION. 


It is as clear and simple as the universal sun- 
light. In spite of all the creeds and all the cate- 
chisms, in spite of all the metaphysical theology, 
in spite of all the criticism and all the contro- 
versy, whatever is essential in religion is open to 
the understanding of a little child. u There are 
diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. And 
there are differences of administrations, but the 
same Lord. And there are diversities of opera- 
tions, but it is the same God which worketh all 
in all .’ 7 That is what it all comes back to. Dif- 
ferences enough, diversities enough, but one and 
the same Holy Spirit, divine Saviour, heavenly 
Father, behind them all. 

The subject is the Simplicity of Religion. 

Religion, above all things, ought to be simple, 
because it is meant for so many simple people. 
It is a message for everybody, and must needs be 
capable of translation into everybody’s language. 
And u everybody” is a wide word. It cannot 


114 


THE SIMPLICITY OF RELIGION. 


possibly be made to mean only the professors in 
the theological seminaries. 

Religion is a universal need of man. It means 
instruction in perplexity, strength in temptation, 
comfort in grief ; it is an answer to the universal 
questions — What am I? And what am I here 
for? And whither am I going? We all want to 
know that — all of us — not the philosophers alone. 
The great fact of sin and the great fact of pain get 
into every life. People who cannot read nor write 
walk along the ways of temptation, and look into 
the black depths of open graves, and so have need 
of the guidance and consolation of religion. 

It would be hard to have to think that the 
good tidings of the Christian gospel should have 
been put into such large words and such long 
sentences that only the educated could make 
them out, and get the blessing of them. Some- 
how, when the angels taught religion out of the 
Bethlehem sky, the simple shepherds understood 
them. The Christmas sermon needed no inter- 
pretation at the hands of Pharisees and scribes. 

When the great spiritual Master taught religion 
he did not teach it in Solomon’s Porch to a select 
company of Jerusalem’s wisest philosophers. He 
taught wherever he could get a hearing, out under 
the open sky, and in the streets of cities, and in 
the common houses of common people. And the 


THE SIMPLICITY OF RELIGION. 


115 


common people heard him gladly. He taught 
religion so that peasants and fishermen could un- 
derstand it. 

And yet there seem to be a great many hard 
things in religion. There are knots in it that 
cannot be untied except by doctors of divinity, 
and not always very successfully by them. Some- 
times it seems like a hopelessly inextricable tangle. 
Sometimes it seems like a confusion of contra- 
dicting voices, some crying this and some that. 
There are so many “differences of administra- 
tion,” so many “diversities of operations,” so 
many sects and parties, so many arguments and 
doctrines, that plain people fall into perplexity. 
To one who reads the titles of the books in theo- 
logical libraries, religion seems a very complicated 
matter. 

Part of this difficulty and difference in religion 
is due to theology ; part of it is due to tempera- 
ment. 

Theology is the scientific statement of religion. 
It is an endeavor to get together all ascertain- 
able religious truth, to classify it, to give it ac- 
curate definition, to draw out of it all available 
inferences. And that means difficulty always. 
All science is difficult, runs speedily into hard 
names and higher mathematics, and rises into 
the regions of unanswerable questions. 


116 


THE SIMPLICITY OF RELIGION. 


And yet we manage to get a good deal of satis- 
faction out of life though we may be utterly 
ignorant of quadratic equations. We can appre- 
ciate the pleasant flowers without knowing very 
much about botany. The sun will warm us and 
give us light to see by though we cannot tell how 
far distant it is from the surface of this planet, 
though we know not whether it be a solid or a 
gas. We can enjoy our dinners without an ac- 
quaintance with the intricate processes of di- 
gestion. We can see out of our eyes without 
knowing the first law of optics. Natural gas 
serves a great many people who could not write 
its chemical formula. 

Somebody says that the most important fact in 
human life is that the geometrical symbol Pi 
equals 3.141592. I confess that I have not at the 
present moment more than the vaguest notion 
about the significance of that fact. And yet we 
live and move and have our being. 

Nothing is plainer to everybody’s sight and 
touch than matter. But matter is one of the 
great mysteries. No man of science has yet been 
able to say conclusively what matter is. Some 
say that matter is made of infinitely small and 
hard atoms $ others say that matter is made of 
little perpetually whirling rings j still others hold 
that matter does not exist at all, that the only 


THE SIMPLICITY OF RELIGION. 117 

thing that we can be absolutely sure of is a sen- 
sation in our eyes and ears and at the tips of our 
fingers. There is no doctrine in the science of 
theology that is more disputed than the doctrine 
of matter is in the science of physics. 

These perplexities are inseparable from the en- 
deavor after accurate definition. They belong to 
scientific thought. Difficulty is not found only 
in theology. The fact is that we can go only a 
certain distance in any direction 5 we can think 
only so far into things physical, mental, or spir- 
itual. After that we get beyond our depth. We 
fall into all manner of confusion. And what the 
confusion means is not that we have come to the 
end of truth, but that we have come to the end 
of the strength of the human mind. 

Nevertheless, common life is not affected by 
these scientific perplexities. The discussions of 
the scientific doctors as to the nature of matter 
do not deter us from building houses. We do 
not hesitate to walk abroad because there is a sci- 
entific uncertainty about the nature of space. 
These high matters make no difference with daily 
life. 

The discussions of theology ought not to per- 
plex any but the theologians. They have no more 
to do with religion than an acquaintance with 
chemistry has to do with eating, or a knowledge 


118 


THE SIMPLICITY OF RELIGION. 


of geology has to do with the appreciation of the 
beauties of a landscape. We can love God though 
we may not be able to recite the Athanasian creed. 
We can read our Bibles and get help out of them 
without needing to know anything about theories 
of inspiration. The nature of the sacrament of 
the Lord’s Supper is not dependent upon the re- 
sult of the controversies about it. Christ died 
for our sins. No matter about the doctrines of 
the atonement. 

The difficulties of religion, then, belong to the 
scientific side of it. They are difficulties of defi- 
nition. They are of the same sort with the diffi- 
culties which meet men in every direction of sci- 
entific thought. They have no more bearing upon 
common life than any other metaphysics. 

As for the differences of religion, they arise, 
for the most part, out of the natural differences 
of human nature. They are due to temperament. 

Religion is meant for all kinds of people ; and 
there -are a great many kinds of people. People 
are different j and a universal religion must have 
room in it for innumerable differences. 

That is what Christ taught. That is what Paul 
taught. We have not even yet learned the lesson 
very well, but in the days of the beginnings of 
Christianity people had not learned it at all. It 
was accounted heresy. The orthodox contended 


THE SIMPLICITY OP RELIGION. 119 

in those days that nobody could really be religious 
unless he was religious in just one way. He must 
become a Jew : he must keep every rubric of the 
Hebrew law. 

Even Peter needs a revelation out of the sky 
before he can be persuaded to admit a Gentile 
into the Christian society. Even Paul must first 
be blinded by a light from heaven before he can 
shut his eyes to the difference between the Greek 
and the Hebrew, and care no more about it. 

That there could be varieties of faith and prac- 
tice in the same Church was a thing which to a 
good many people in that old day was as incred- 
ible, as undesirable, as dangerous, and as perni- 
cious as it is to a good many good people still. 
The very first thing which the Christian religion 
did was to turn its back upon exclusion and uni- 
formity. Alone among all the religious teachers 
of his time, Christ recognized the divine right of 
human differences. Christ saw that one man 
differs from another. 

One would think that anybody must see so 
plain a fact as that. But every division into which 
the Church of Christ is to-day shamefully divided 
is a testimony to somebody’s blindness. Every 
single sect means that somebody some time failed 
to recognize this inevitable fact of human differ- 
ence, and quarreled with it. You might as well 


120 


THE SIMPLICITY OF RELIGION. 


quarrel with the law of gravitation. One after 
another the Christian Church has turned her chil- 
dren out-of-doors by trying to make them all 
alike, and disowning all who failed to fit the 
standard. 

Those party names of “ high ” and “ broad ” and 
“ low,” which we hear more often than we like to, 
represent absolutely unchangeable and eternal 
differences in human nature. They symbolize 
different ways of emphasizing religious truth. 
There always have been and there always will be 
people with whom the most important part of re- 
ligion is that side of it which looks toward God, 
and finds expression in worship. There always 
have been and there always will be people with 
whom the most important part of religion is that 
side of it which looks toward the soul, and finds 
expression in emotion. There always have been 
and there always will be people with whom the 
most important part of religion is that side of it 
which looks toward the world about them, and 
finds expression partly in the extension of Chris- 
tian charity and in the uplifting of the bodies, 
minds, and souls of men, and partly in an en- 
deavor to state religious truth so that it may com- 
mend itself to everybody’s reason, and get hold of 
everybody’s will. That is, there have always 
been “ high ” churchmen, and “ low ” churchmen, 


THE SIMPLICITY OF RELIGION. 121 

and “ broad ” churchmen ; and there always ought 
to be, and there always will be. 

But somehow we have now these many centu- 
ries been behaving as if all men were made alike. 
We have somehow succeeded in persuading our- 
selves that everybody who is not exactly of our 
kind is wrong, and ought to be put out. And we 
did put out low-church Wesley, and we did put 
out high-church Newman, and we are busy just 
at this day trying to find some good “broad” 
churchman whom w^e may put out after them. 

When the Christian missionaries from France 
and the Christian missionaries from Wales met in 
pagan England, they agreed that there was a 
great work for them to do, a work that needed all 
the energy they had. But the French said to the 
Welsh, “First, before we can work together, you 
must cut your hair exactly as we cut ours.” 

When the “low” churchmen, who were then 
called “ Puritans,” met the orthodox of their day 
in conference at Hampton Court, the orthodox 
said : “ It is, indeed, a blessed thing that brethren 
shall dwell together in unity, but, dearly beloved, 
if you would say your prayers with us you must, 
above all else, wear the same kind of prayer-gown 
that we wear. Not one of you must be seen with- 
out a surplice.” The result was the Presbyterian 


communion. 


122 


THE SIMPLICITY OP RELIGION. 


What we all need to recognize is that uniformity 
is impossible, and that variety is the law of nature 
nad of God. There are differences of administra- 
tion, yes, but the same Lord. What we need to 
see is that the matters about which we differ be- 
long wholly to the outside of religion. They 
really have no more to do with the heart of relig- 
ion than the paint on the outside of an engine 
has to do with the running of the wheels. Ques- 
tions as to ecclesiastical government, whether by 
bishops or by presbyters j questions as to clerical 
dress, the most trivial, one would think, of all 
things which might interest the mind of man $ 
questions as to ritual, much or little water, stand- 
ing or kneeling, singing hymns or singing psalms 
— how is it that Christians can make these mat- 
ters synonymous with Christianity ? 

People are different $ let them think differently. 
Whatever really helps is right. Whatever hin- 
ders is wrong. And what hinders one may help 
another. If the Church is a sect, if it is a little, 
petty, religious confraternity, then set Procrustes’ 
bed at the door of it, and measure every comer, 
and cut off all the tall people’s feet, and stretch 
out all the short people. But if the Church is a 
great, broad catholic Church, such as Christ meant 
it to be, let everybody in, and keep everybody in 
who loves him and wants to serve him. There is 


THE SIMPLICITY OF RELIGION. 123 

a place in the wide Church catholic for every 
honest man that breathes. 

We go back behind the difficulties of theology 
and the differences of temperament, and we find 
the “ same Spirit,” and the “ same Lord,” and the 
u same God which worketh all in all.” And it is 
as clear and simple as the universal sunlight. 
When the minister stands by the bed of death 
to tell the Christian message over again, it does 
not much matter who he is, it is one simple story. 

Christ is Christianity. Religion is part faith 
and part love. And the love part of it is simply 
a following in the steps of Jesus Christ, trying to 
be as like him as we can, going about doing good, 
as he did. All the ethical precepts of our religion 
are summed up in the example of Christ. And 
the faith part of it is simply a trusting of the 
words of Jesus Christ. He said he knew. And 
he told us plainly that God is our Father, and 
that there is a life beyond the grave. And we 
believe him. We take his word of teaching as a 
child takes the word of his father. 

To try to live as Christ lived, to be content to 
take as true what Christ said, how simple that is ! 
It is the beginning, and the middle, and the end 
of all religion. 


FOUR WAYS OF LOVING GOD. 


“ Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy 
heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy 
mind.” That is St. Matthew’s record of Christ’s 
great commandment. “And with all thy strength,” 
St. Mark says, making it wider still. 

Both of these gospel writers tell us that Jesus 
said also, “ Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy- 
self.” But they both agree that he said that af- 
terward, putting the other first, calling the other 
the “ great” commandment, and this the “ second.” 
The order is significant. Christ sets a peculiar 
emphasis upon the love of God. He wants us to 
love our neighbors ; but, first of all and chief of 
all, he wants us to devote our heart, and soul, and 
mind, and strength to God. 

This emphatic priority and preference is made 
particularly noticeable by the earnestness and 
persistence with which Jesus always insisted 
upon the observance of that other commandment 
which is here set second. It means a great deal, 


FOUR WAYS OF LOVING GOD. 


125 


that he was wining to put anything ahead of 
that. 

No spiritual teacher ever laid a deeper empha- 
sis than Jesus did upon man’s duty to his fellow- 
men. AU the altruisms, and socialisms, and sec- 
ularisms, and ethical-culture-isms get their best 
inspiration out of the Christian gospel. Felix 
Adler, the leading ethical lecturer of this coun- 
try, did indeed say to me the other day at Plym- 
outh, that the province of religion hes in the 
domain of the affections, and that if we want real 
education in conduct we must go to phdosophy. 
But Christ taught more about conduct than he 
did about anything else. The great purpose of 
rehgion, as he conceived of it, is to make men 
better. It is true that he appealed to the affec- 
tions, for he who addresses the affections speaks 
a universal language. Everybody can under- 
stand him. And Christ wanted everybody to un- 
derstand him. But it is also true that he ap- 
pealed to the reason and to the will. No man 
ever breathed who had so lofty an ideal of human 
behavior, who attached so much importance to 
every-day morality, who insisted so strongly upon 
the translation of every spiritual truth into right- 
eous speech and righteous action. He taught his 
disciples that the real test of a man’s creed is 
the man’s character • that there is no allowable 


126 


FOUR WAYS OF LOVING GOD. 


divorce between good belief and good behavior ; 
that whoever loves God loves his brother also. 
In the ethics of Jesus these two go inseparably 
together j one is root and one is branch • one is 
cause and the other is consequence. No teach- 
ings have ever so uplifted man. 

There is no danger that Christ will undervalue 
character, or cheapen morality, or set neighborly 
duty on a lower plane than belongs to it. Christ 
knows better than all the philosophers of all time 
the true worth of ethics. 

And yet Christ sets conduct second. “Thou 
shalt love thy neighbor as thyself ” is command- 
ment number two. The supreme duty is God- 
ward j God- ward first and then man- ward. The 
very first thing that Christ asks about a man is, 
Does he love the Lord our God? In the old 
torch-races that the Greeks ran in their games, 
no man’s running counted for anything if the 
fight in his torch went out. Before all else it 
was required that he keep that flame alive. And 
love for God, it seems, is the sacred, necessary 
flame in the race of human fife. When we con- 
sider the profound emphasis that Jesus put upon 
brotherly love, we begin, as I said, to see how 
much it means that he set this even before that. 
God first. “ Thou shalt love the Lord thy God 
with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with 


FOUR WAYS OF LOVING GOD. 


127 


all thy mind, and with all thy strength.” We 
will love God a great deal if we love him as much 
as that ! 

See how wide are the limits of this emphatic 
“'great” commandment 5 how boundlessly inclu- 
sive, and within the reach of everybody’s obedi- 
ence. God is the universal Father. There are 
all sorts and conditions of men in his great fam- 
ily. And there must be all sorts and conditions 
of regard for God. All of us different people 
must think of God in different ways, because we 
are different. No two children love their mother 
in exactly the same way; every mother knows 
that. 

You see that the great commandment makes 
room for all these wide diversities. The strong- 
est part of one man is the strength of his arm. 
He can do nothing so well as to pull and lift and 
push. Another is a great deal better at thinking 
than he is at lifting ; cares more for books than 
he does for blocks of wood or steel; handles a 
pen more skillfully than any other tool ; and is 
best at whatever occupies the energies of the 
mind. Other people attain their highest possibil- 
ities in their affections; cannot manage very 
heavy weights, nor make out very difficult prob- 
lems, but are strong in believing, gifted with 
great capacities for trusting, blessed with deep 


128 


FOUR WAYS OF LOVING GOD. 


and warm affections. All these different natures 
approach God from different sides. Nobody loves 
God with heart, and soul, and strength, and mind 
alike. And here is the blessed temple of the love 
of God, lying four-square, facing the four corners 
of the earth, with a great wide-open door on every 
side, so that every man who will walk straight on 
in the path where God has placed him may come 
up to it, and find access and invitation and wel- 
come, and may enter in. 

There are four ways of loving God — with heart, 
and soul, and mind, and strength. 

It is not easy to tell wherein the difference lies 
between the love of God with the heart and the 
love of God with the soul. Heart and soul seem 
to be words of very nearly the same meaning. 
We notice, however, when we think about it, that 
the soul signifies much more about a man than 
the heart. The heart is the seat of the emotions 
and affections 5 it is that part of our being with 
which we experience joy, and grief, and love. 
But the soul of a man is the man himself ; it is 
the immortal, the spiritual, the divine part of us. 
The most blessed privileges, the profoundest real- 
ities of religion, are associated with the soul. 
Christ came to save our souls. 

We love God, then, with the heart when we love 
him somewhat as the disciples loved the Master, 


FOUR WAYS OF LOVING GOD. 


129 


as St. John, whom he loved, loved him. We love 
him as Mary did when she cried, “ Rabboni ! ” in 
the garden of the resurrection, and fell at his feet 
in adoration. There are blessed serene souls to 
whom God seems close as a personal friend. They 
are always conscious of his blessed presence. 
They trust him ; they depend upon him; they 
go to him with all their troubles and temptations, 
with their blessings, sure of his attention, of his 
unfailing interest, of his help and sympathy. 
They delight in praying to him. They rejoice in 
reciting sentences of devotion. The still sanctu- 
ary, with its holy associations, its heavenly sym- 
bols, its company of silent worshipers, seems to 
them like an opening of the gates of pearl. 

These devout disciples, like the old psalmist, 
are glad of every opportunity of going into the 
house of the Lord. The service satisfies them. 
They like the early communions in the quiet of 
the new morning. They are appreciative of ev- 
erything that makes the church more beautiful ; 
think as much of rites and ceremonies, of lights 
and colors, as Moses and Aaron did. They get 
the name of being ritualists, because they are not 
content to worship only with their hearts, but 
want to worship with their bodies also. They 
bow their heads and their knees, and cross them- 
selves. 


130 


FOUR WAYS OF LOVING GOD. 


The books of devotion are written for these 
disciples, and it is for them that the church doors 
stand open between Sundays. They know what 
worship means. Religion, as they understand it, 
is profoundly sacramental. It signifies approach 
to God. There are some of these saints in every 
Christian communion. They love God with all 
their hearts. 

There are other saints who love God with all 
their souls. To them the central fact in human 
life is the fact of sin, and the supreme blessing of 
religion is the blessing of salvation. Christ is pre- 
eminently the Saviour. Christianity is founded 
upon the atonement. The gospel is the good 
news of pardon. The chief concern of a Chris- 
tian is about his soul. The most important part 
of the public service of religion is that which ad- 
dresses the soul. The emphasis is upon the ser- 
mon. The most serious of all questions is, What 
shall I do to be saved ? 

The soul is that part of us which lasts, which 
goes on through the grave and gate of death into 
the mysteries beyond. They who love God with 
all their souls, and love him as the savior of their 
souls, think a great deal about this future of the 
soul. Every man stands every day separate and 
alone from all his fellows, in the plain sight of 


FOUR WAYS OF LOVING GOD. 


131 


God, actually and absolutely responsible to God 
for all that he does, and says, and is. And by 
and by is the judgment, when all souls shall meet 
the Judge, and there give solemn account of 
themselves to him. 

Sin, salvation, responsibility, judgment, reward, 
punishment, eternity are great thoughts in the 
living and praying of people who think of relig- 
ion in that way. You see the difference between 
these two phases of religion. They who love God 
with all their hearts look up to him, adore him, 
and seek his blessing with all his other children 
in his Church, in his appointed sacraments. They 
who love God with all their souls look in at their 
souls before they look up, are conscious that they 
stand each one by himself in the presence of that 
supreme Judge who has the final decision of all 
human destiny, and who hates sin • and they lay 
hold with all their might upon the hand of their 
Saviour, that he may assist and deliver them. It 
is the difference between the catholic and the 
protestant elements in our modern Christianity ; 
the difference between the devotion of St. John 
and the penitence and faith of St. Paul. 

Then there are still other Christians, who love 
God with all their minds. They are devoted seek- 
ers after truth, and count no discovery so desira- 


132 


FOUR WAYS OF LOVING GOD. 


ble as the discovery of truth. They seek truth 
in all parts of the great universe of God. Some 
in the sky, some in the rocks, some in the living 
creatures with which God has peopled this planet, 
some in the growth, the struggle, the achievement, 
the manifold experience of man. All truth is a 
revelation of God. All nature is God made par- 
tially visible to his children. All history is the 
record of the work of God in the betterment and 
instruction of the race. All study is the study 
of theology. Every search after the reason of 
things opens a window into the infinite, and gives 
the seeker glimpses of God. All the good books 
were written by the finger of the good God. 

Some people get closer to God by getting closer 
to their fellow-men. They do not believe that 
God is up above the clouds, nor that he is shut in 
by all the doors and windows of all the churches. 
They think that whoever wants to find God will 
find him quickest where he has set his image and 
breathed his breath, in the midst of the great 
family of his human children. 

“ The parish priest 
Of Austerlitz 

Climbed up in a high church-steeple 
To be nearer God, 

So that he might hand 
His word down to his people. 


FOUR WAYS OF LOVING GOD. 133 

“ And in sermon script 
He daily wrote 

What he thought was sent from heaven, 

And he dropt this down 
On his peoples’ heads 
Two times one day in seven. 

“ In his age God said, 

1 Come down and die ! * 

And he cried out from the steeple, 

1 Where art thou, Lord ? * 

And the Lord replied, 

1 Down here among my people ! ’ ” 

Many who have learned that lesson hold that 
working is a better part of loving God than pray- 
ing, that practicing is more acceptable to God 
than preaching, and that a man owes his supreme 
duty not to his own soul, but to the helping and 
the comforting of the soul of his less fortunate 
brother. They like to remember how Christ said, 
u Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of 
these my brethren ye have done it unto me.” And 
so they apply their minds to the solution of the 
vast problems of poverty, and pain, and sin. They 
account that the best of all truth in this present 
hour and place is economic truth. They are re- 
ligiously interested in sanitation, in temperance, 
in socialism, in all manner of reform and better- 
ment. And they think that they can show their 


134 


FOUR WAYS OF LOVING GOD. 


love for God in no better fashion. They love God 
with their minds. 

It has perhaps occurred to you already that 
these different ways of loving God represent those 
different temperaments which, as I often say, have 
always had their place and will always have their 
place in every company of Christian people. 
There must always be “high” churchmen, who 
love God with their hearts $ and “ low ” church- 
men, who love God with their souls ; and “ broad ” 
churchmen, who love God with their minds. It 
is hard, many times, for one to understand the 
other. The low churchman thinks that the high 
churchman is given over to ceremony, and the 
broad churchman to skepticism. One of the 
most difficult things in the whole world is to un- 
derstand and appreciate people who differ from 
us, especially those who seem to differ in the 
whole trend and spirit of their thinking. But 
there are different kinds of people, and even 
different kinds of saints. And another Christian 
may be unlike us in almost every particular, and 
yet love God as much, and be just as good a 
Christian as we are. The best plan is for each 
one of us to be the very best Christian he knows 
how to be, and let his brother take his own path 
into the great four-square temple of the love of 
God. Thank God, God knows us all ! 


FOUR WAYS OF LOVING GOD. 135 

Finally, there are people who love God with 
all their strength. That ought to take in every 
one of us. 

We love God with all our strength when we do 
our work for him, for him to see. A man who 
breaks stone and breaks it well, and cares even 
more to have that stone well broken than to have 
the overseer notice that it is well broken, loves 
God with his strength. A maid who sweeps the 
corners of a room, and cares more to have the 
darkest corner absolutely clean than she does to 
have her mistress see that it is clean, loves God 
with her strength. Anybody who works well at 
anything, minding most of all how the work looks 
to God, who sees the top of it and the bottom of 
it, loves God with all his strength. St. Paul 
gives the rule for it: “Not with eye-service as 
men-pleasers, but as the servants of God.” 

There is more love of God in the world than 
we think. The high churchmen and the low 
churchmen and the broad churchmen all together 
do not monopolize it. There will be a great many 
surprised people at the Day of Judgment. And 
some will be surprised to find that they have all 
their lives been loving God. There is a love of 
honesty, a love of honor, a love of virtue, a love 
of purity, which is really love of God. Whoever, 
for its own sake, loves the right loves God. 


136 


FOUR WAYS OF LOVING GOD. 


All the lovers of God love him in all four of 
these ways at once, with heart, and mind, and 
soul, and strength. The difference between peo- 
ple is not a difference of distinction, so that some 
love God with their hearts altogether and not 
with their souls at all. It is a difference of em- 
phasis, just as everybody has some imagination, 
and some memory, and some reason j but with 
one the imagination is his most prominent and 
strongest quality j with another the reason ; with 
another the memory. What we need to do is to 
cultivate that kind of love for God in which we 
find ourselves most lacking. If we love God 
most with our hearts, let us try to deepen in us 
the sense of sin, the realization of personal re- 
sponsibility, and so love God more with our souls. 
If we love God most with our minds, let us try to 
deepen in us the feeling of reverence, the habit 
of worship, the attitude of adoration, and so iove 
God more with our hearts. 


THE INTERVIEW WITH NICODEMUS. 


“ There was a man of the Pharisees, named 
Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews : the same came to 
Jesus by night and said unto him, Rabbi, we 
know that thou art a teacher come from God : for 
no man can do these miracles that thou doest, ex- 
cept God be with him.” 

That is what a teacher who came from the 
schools of J erusalem said to the teacher who came 
from God. Thus began the interview of Christ 
with Nicodemus. 

Nicodemus said that one night in a Jerusalem 
lodging-house, in the presence of Jesus Christ. 
Nicodemus was an old man, a Pharisee, a mem- 
ber of that great council of the Hebrew nation, 
the Sanhedrim; a man probably wealthy, cer- 
tainly of important position, a “ruler of the 
Jews.” Take an English bishop, and an English 
lord, and an English head-of-a-college, combine 
the three dignities in one person, and you get a 
glimpse of Nicodemus. That was the kind of 


138 THE INTERVIEW WITH NICODEMUS. 

place he held in the estimation of the people of 
Jerusalem. A man of eminence, a leader in the 
world ecclesiastical, in the world intellectual, in 
the world political. When he passed along the 
road everybody knew him. If he were to knock 
at the door of a small house on a back street and 
go in, there would be twenty people to wonder 
why. Thus he went in the dark, upon a windy 
night, when the street would be empty, and he 
would be unseen. 

Jesus of Nazareth, with whom this great man 
held this secret interview, had come down a few 
days before out of Galilee, where his home was, 
and had set all tongues to talking about him, in 
consequence of a singular occurrence in the Tem- 
ple. It was the time of the Passover, and the city 
was crowded with visiting worshipers. The Tem- 
ple court was thronged with people, coming to 
pay their church taxes and to offer their accus- 
tomed sacrifices. In order to pay their taxes they 
had to get their money changed into Hebrew 
coin; and in order to offer their sacrifices they 
had to have doves and sheep and oxen. And 
Annas, the high-priest, had accordingly turned a 
part of the great church into a market. The 
tables of the brokers, the stalls of the cattle, the 
seats of them that sold doves, were the center of 
unceasing noisy traffic. The Temple officials had 


THE INTERVIEW WITH NICODEMUS. 139 

a monopoly of this religious business, and a most 
irreligious use they made of it. It was an illus- 
tration of that amazing and scandalous paradox 
which every day finds example somewhere — the 
impiety of the pious, the rascality of the right- 
eous. They stole money out of poor men’s pock- 
ets. The whole thing was an organized desecra- 
tion, a consecrated robbery. And now, of a sud- 
den, when the crowds were greatest, had come in 
Jesus of Nazareth, of whom nobody had heard 
before, a young man not past thirty, a carpenter’s . 
son from a country village back in Galilee ; in he 
had come, bringing a whip with him, and had 
actually driven out the whole company of thieves 
and robbers into the street. 

Everybody was talking about him. He had a 
little company of disciples with him, peasants and 
fishermen from Galilee. He was teaching where- 
ever he could find listeners, saying strange things. 
A radical, a communist, the herald of a social revo- 
lution, a man who cared a great deal for the com- 
mon people, but very little, so they said, for either 
Church or state. He wanted to put the old out, 
and to bring in a new condition of things which, 
he said, was better, called the “kingdom of 
heaven,” part of whose programme consisted in 
putting down the mighty from their seats and 
exalting these of low degree, in filling the hungry 


140 THE INTERVIEW WITH NICODEMUS. 

with good things and sending the rich empty 
away. Suspicions utterances ! What has this 
eminently respectable and conservative Nicode- 
mus to do with this Galilean agitator ? 

Nicodemus was evidently one of those of whom 
it was written in the record : “ Now, when he was 
in Jerusalem at the Passover, during the feast, 
many believed on his name, beholding his signs 
which he did.” Here, accordingly, is a man with 
an open mind, nothing narrow nor intolerant 
about him. Plainly he had been impressed. 
This strange young enthusiast out of the north, 
bent on overturning all the old, evil institutions 
of the time, beginning with the tables of the 
money-changers, had evidently won the deep at- 
tention of this conservative aristocrat. The fact 
is significant. 

There are people whom the arguments of the 
Archangel Gabriel could not move out of their 
accustomed way. Their eyes are tight shut. 
They have made up their minds and locked them, 
and there is the end of it. Christ met such men 
every day. The age was one of pronounced hos- 
tility to new truth. Only the old was true. The 
old dead doctors, the old dead confessions of 
faith, dominated the whole thought of the day. 

u Ye have heard that it was said by them of 
old time,” was the preface to the utterance of in- 


THE INTERVIEW WITH NICODEMUS. 141 

fallibility. When Christ said, “ But I say unto 
you,” all who heard that independent pronoun 
held their breath. Here was a man with an opin- 
ion, with a mind of his own. It was amazing ! It 
was astounding ! 

All honor, then, to Nicodemus, who heard new 
truth taught in the streets, and wanted to hear 
more of it, and was willing to take the risk of 
embarrassing discovery and serious consequences 
to make a visit to this new teacher. It is true he 
came by night, and was not so brave as he might 
have been, and went away afterward and took his 
old place among the doctors. He was no great 
hero. But it is worth a great deal, and speaks 
well for Nicodemus, that he came at all. 

And Nicodemus seems to say that he is not 
alone in this laudable curiosity. “ We know,” he 
says, “ that thou art a teacher come from God.” 
Who are the others, sharers in this knowledge? 
Eminent men, no doubt, rulers, Pharisees, com- 
panions of Nicodemus. We seem to get a whisper 
here from the secret councils of the Sanhedrim. 
Nicodemus came alone, but behind were others 
waiting to question him, eager to learn whatever 
he might learn. Even in the most narrow genera- 
tion new truth finds its way into some hearts 
Christ comes to his own and his own receive him 
not; but some receive him. Some Nicodemus, 


142 THE INTERVIEW WITH NICODEMUS. 

though, it be by night, searches him out. There 
is more good in the world, more earnestness, more 
“ thirst for God,” than the world gets credit for. 
“We know that thou art a teacher come from 
God.” They said that in their hearts. They went 
on, day by day, keeping the old customs, changing 
scarcely at all ; nobody dreamed of calling them 
followers of Christ. And yet the words of Christ 
were in their ears and in their hearts. And they 
were in secret disciples of Christ. And who will 
say that that is not better than being no disciple 
of Christ at all ? Like men to-day who stand out- 
side the Church and never say that they are on 
Christ’s side, and yet are on Christ’s side in secret. 

Let Christ come to-day, a poor man, a working- 
man in his working clothes, a street preacher at 
the corners of our familiar streets, with no ap- 
probation from society, with disapproval from the 
press and the pulpit, promising food for the hun- 
gry and poverty for the rich, preaching a “ king- 
dom of heaven,” who would listen? Would it 
not be once again the “ common people ” ? Where 
is the rich man, where is the conservative Chris- 
tian, where is the orthodox parson, who would 
seek him out, even after dark, in his tenement- 
house lodging, and tell him he believed in him ? 
Would we do that ? That is what Nicodemus did. 

Now, Jesus of Nazareth wanted his new truth 


THE INTERVIEW WITH NICODEMUS. 143 

to get into the hearts of all men. And anybody 
might have told him that the quickest way to do 
that was to persuade wealth and influence over to 
his side. And here was his easy opportunity. 
Here was Nicodemus, a Pharisee and a ruler of 
the Jews, interested even to the point of taking 
risks, standing in his own room, and asking, with 
astonishing condescension, to be taught. “ Rabbi, 
we know that thou art a teacher come from God.” 
That was the first step to discipleship. 

The conversation that follows is plainly but a 
brief fragment of what was said that night. But 
it is evident from what is written that Jesus did 
not show any unusual eagerness in receiving his 
unusual visitor. For wealth, for position, for in- 
fluence of intellectual men, for most of the outside 
advantages which a new movement is accustomed 
to account of value, Jesus cared absolutely noth- 
ing. He went out of his way one time to get into 
the company of his disciples a man named Mat- 
thew, a publican, the most unpopular man in 
Capernaum. But when a rich young enthusiast 
came to him running, holding out his hands, eager 
to follow him, and ready to bring his money with 
him, Jesus said that he must leave his money all 
behind and come in poor. And when this in- 
fluential Pharisee, rich and of high position, a 
man of dignity and learning, seeks him out, sets 


144 THE INTERVIEW WITH NICODEMUS. 

him self at his feet, and asks to be taught, Jesns 
says : Nicodemus, the first thing for you to do is 
to begin all over again. You must break with 
your past. Your office, your money, your book- 
learning will count for nothing if you come with 
me. The only distinction among my disciples is a 
distinction of character. Y ou must be bora again. 
You must begin at the very beginning before you 
can so much as see the kingdom of heaven. And 
the old man would not do that. The conditions 
were too hard for him. The conversation breaks 
off suddenly in the record, and nothing is said 
about the answer of Nicodemus. But he did not 
come out openly for Christ. We know that. He 
kept his office. 

Nothing can be imagined more unworldly than 
this interview with Nicodemus. To Christ a man 
was of consequence exactly in proportion to his 
manhood. No other consideration entered in. 
He cared just as much for a poor man as he did 
for a rich man, and just as much for a rich man 
as he did for a poor man. That is, he cared for 
the man. He set no more account upon the man’s 
position, or popularity, or money than he did upon 
the color of his hair. As for the notion that 
influential names would help his cause, nothing 
could have been further from his wish. He wanted 
no man to be his disciple because Peter belonged 


THE INTERVIEW WITH NICODEMUS. 145 

to the company of the disciples, or because Na- 
thanael belonged among them. He wanted no 
man to come in because another man had come. 
He looked ahead, no doubt, with apprehension to 
the day when Christianity would become popular. 
He knew that all the rulers, and all the Pharisees, 
and all the great and rich would some time pro- 
claim themselves upon his side, and he dreaded 
that time. He wanted disciples who would believe 
in him with their own free faith, and accept his 
truth with minds which recognized and appre- 
ciated it 5 who would really love him, and him 
alone above all others j and who would be deter- 
mined to stand upon his side though nobody else 
stood there the whole world over. 

And Jesus looked into the eyes of Nicodemus, 
and he saw that he was not that sort of disciple, 
and he did not want him. Yes, he wanted him 
— but changed first; a man with a new heart, 
born again. He did not want the Nicodemus that 
he saw. He listened to him, and he answered him 
with a truth which tested him. And Nicodemus 
did not stand the test. 

For Nicodemus was not really convinced. He 
was impressed, there is no doubt of that, and 
strongly impressed, but he was not fully per- 
suaded. Listen to him : “ Rabbi, we know that 
thou art a teacher come from God, for no man can 


146 THE INTERVIEW WITH NICODEMUS. 

do these miracles that thou doest except God he 
with him.” 

I would rather hear Nicodemus say “ I ” than 
“we” That would sound better. That is the 
way the Christian creed begins, with that signifi- 
cant pronoun “ I.” The Christian stands alone, as 
he will stand in the Day of Judgment, and looks 
up into the face of God, and speaks for his own 
self. Others may say this or that j thus and so 
may the official teachers teach $ here or there may 
blow the wind of popular doctrine j but I, holding 
up my hand alone, with all my heart hold this. 
That is the attitude of Christian faith. There is 
something evasive, timid, half-persuaded about 
this desire to get among a crowd and say “we 
know.” 

And then, notice how Nicodemus thinks of 
Christ. He is a teacher and a miracle-worker. 
Nicodemus has been won to admiration by his 
doctrines, and has been struck with amazement 
by his wonders. That, indeed, is the beginning 
of discipleship. Men everywhere come under the 
influence of Christ by the attraction of his words 
and of his works. But Christ was not content 
that any man should stop there. He wanted more 
than that. He was not satisfied with admiration ; 
he wanted allegiance. “ The Jews ask for signs,” 
St. Paul says, “ and the Greeks seek after wisdom.” 


THE INTERVIEW WITH NICODEMUS. 147 

The Jews will be persuaded if you can show them 
a miracle, and the Greeks will be convinced if you 
can bring them to the conclusion of an argument. 
“ But we preach Christ crucified,” he says, “ unto 
the Jews a stumbling-block and unto the Greeks 
foolishness ; but unto them that are called, Christ 
the power of God, and the wisdom of God.” There 
it is. Nicodemus is part Jew and part Greek ; he 
has seen signs and heard wisdom, so he comes. 
Christ wants him to be altogether Christian. He 
wants him to translate his wonder and his admi- 
ration into love. Do you not see how Nicodemus 
stands off and looks at Christ from a distance 1 
Do you not feel a difference between the courteous 
respect of Nicodemus and the warm affection of 
John and Peter? 

There is what the matter is with Nicodemus. 
Let no man think that Christ is satisfied with 
such discipleship. Christ may be your philoso- 
pher and saint and hero ; you may regard him as 
the wisest of all teachers, as the flower of human- 
ity ; you may even confess that there is something 
divine about him, that he worked wonders, that 
he came from God. And yet you may still stand 
only in the steps of Nicodemus. 

No, Nicodemus was not really convinced. He 
says that he knows that Jesus was a teacher come 
from God. Listen to that, and look at Nicodemus 


148 THE INTERVIEW WITH NICODEMUS. 

shutting the door behind him and going out into 
the dark ! For what shall a man do wdien he has 
discovered a “ teacher come from God ” ? Why, 
follow him devotedly, and obey him unreservedly. 
Between the whole unanimous Sanhedrim on one 
side and a teacher come from God on the other, 
what sane man will hesitate? Who will care 
what the fathers said, who will mind what the 
brethren say, when he can listen to a teacher 
come from God ? What is wealth, place, dignity, 
popularity, beside allegiance to a teacher actually 
come from God ? But Nicodemus did not believe 
what he said. He said “we know”; and very 
likely he thought he spoke the truth, but he did 
not “ know ” at all. For Nicodemus did not fol- 
low Christ. He listened to him, and went away 
impressed, no doubt, more deeply than ever, but 
still not impressed enough. Secretly he rever- 
ences him. But he does not really believe that 
he is a teacher come with a message from the 
Most High God. 

By and by the chief priests and the Pharisees 
send officers to arrest this divine teacher, and the 
officers come back empty-handed, crying, “ Never 
man spoke like this man ! ” They did not dare 
to touch him. Whereupon the rulers answer 
scornfully, “Are ye also led astray?” Then 
speaks Nicodemus, “ Doth our law judge a man 


THE INTERVIEW WITH NICODEMUS. 149 

except it first hear him and know what he doeth ? ” 
He has, perhaps, a hope that if Christ can but 
speak to them as he spoke that night to him, they 
may be persuaded. Bnt they exclaim, “Art thou 
also of Gralilee f ” And Nicodemus has not a word 
to say. This man is not convinced. This creed 
of his is not the Christian creed j and even such 
as it is, he does not actually believe it. He would 
stand up in the council if he did, and say so. 

Nicodemus, then, went away after a whole 
evening’s talk with Jesus Christ, and stayed out- 
side the Christian company. A good man, a man 
of estimable character, a religious man in many 
ways, a man of wealth and education, and of 
standing in the community, one of the rulers. 
This good man heard a sermon preached for his 
own particular benefit by Jesus Christ himself, 
and after the sermon he went on, so far as any- 
body could see, in just the same old way. Even 
the Master’s sermon did not persuade him into 
the company of the disciples, into open and com 
fessed allegiance, into the Church. 

That is a good thing for the discouraged 
preacher to remember. Nicodemus comes to 
church Sunday after Sunday, and the preacher 
has him in his mind when he prepares his ser- 
mon and when he preaches it. He prays Sunday 
after Sunday that his sermon may persuade the 


150 THE INTERVIEW WITH NICODEMUS. 

good Nicodemus to take the next step, to speak 
out what he is hiding in his heart, and to come 
into the Church. And Nicodemus listens, and 
listens, and listens, always with attention; and 
after the service he gets up and goes out, and 
there is the end of it. And the preacher some- 
times thinks that he might as well preach to the 
posts and pillars. 

God help Nicodemus, for somehow we cannot 
help him ! 

But Nicodemus never forgot that interview 
with Jesus Christ, never lost that sermon out of 
his heart, was not just the same man after it that 
he was before. One day the Teacher met the fate 
which he foresaw from the beginning. And then, 
beneath the shadow of the cross, when even those 
who had followed him had fled away into hiding- 
places, came Nicodemus forth, braving the scorn 
of all men, bringing a great and costly offering 
of myrrh and spices for his burial. Nicodemus 
did, at last, stand out upon the side of Christ. 
“ I, if I be lifted up,” he had heard the Master 
say that night, u will draw all men unto me.” And 
here that word began to find fulfillment. Christ 
crucified convinced him. 


RELIGION ON BUSINESS PRINCIPLES. 


Whatever may be said about the need of relig- 
ious principles in business, there can be no 
question as to the need of certain business prin- 
ciples in religion. Christ himself pronounced the 
children of this world wiser than the children of 
light. 

We do not talk much nowadays about the 
u children of this world” or the u children of 
light.” These old phrases have ceased out of our 
modem conversation. We never hear them on 
Monday. They need translation. But what they 
mean when we set them over into the language 
of our day is quite plain to see and easy of un- 
derstanding. The children of this world are the 
people who think more about this world than they 
do about the next, and the children of light are 
the people who have been taught better than that, 
who ought to see clearer than that. 

It is true that there is no such sharp distinction 
possible in human society as would enable us to 


152 RELIGION ON BUSINESS PRINCIPLES. 

divide our neighbors into these two classes, and 
set some here on the right, and others there on 
the ignominious left. God will do that one of 
these days. But, meanwhile, “ Judge not before 
the time” is a good rule. We will be wiser to 
leave it alone. The Puritans tried it once, and 
wrote down as sinners all who did not speak the 
accent of their excellent company. But the Puri- 
tans were mistaken. Saints and sinners are 
somehow inextricably intermingled in the tangle 
of human life. The tares and the wheat look so 
astonishingly alike that even the best theological 
botanists cannot certainly distinguish the one 
from the other. We would better let them alone. 

We are safe, however, in recognizing the 
“ world ” and the u light ” as representing the two 
divisions into which all the interests of life must 
fall, the eternal and the transitory. These two 
divisions divide between them the thoughts of 
every human being. Even the saint cannot give 
his absolutely undivided attention to things eter- 
nal. Bread and butter are not eternal. The dif- 
ferences which God sees among us, which enable 
him to know some of us as the children of the 
world, and others of us as children of light, are 
differences of emphasis. The question is not a 
question of exclusion, but of preference. We 
must care for both the transitory and the perma- 


RELIGION ON BUSINESS PRINCIPLES. 153 

nent ; we must think about the things that perish 
and the things that last. But which do we think 
about and care about the most? That is what 
God looks to see. 

And Christ says that a good many people are 
wiser about transitory things than they are about 
eternal things; that they put more sense into 
their business than they do into their religion. 

Everybody in this world who has any sense at 
all desires to succeed in religion. For it is evi- 
dent, upon the least reflection, that that is the 
only permanent success. There will be no money 
in the world to come. Among the “ many man- 
sions ” of the holy city there will be none of the 
significant differences which we see about us 
here. There will be no tenement-houses. And 
there will be no social distinctions in that other 
country, except the differences which are based 
on actual character. The question as to what 
this man or that is u worth ” will not be answered 
there by any sum of dollars. All that we leave 
behind us when we die. The only success that 
lasts is success in religion. 

An d religion has to do with God ; there is no 
religion without God. You know what the Bible 
says about good works without faith. It says 
that they are dead ; that they count for nothing 
at all ; do not exist ; and faith is the upward look 


154 RELIGION ON BUSINESS PRINCIPLES. 

toward God. You know what St. Paul says 
about charity : that a man may give all his goods 
to feed the poor, and yet if he have not charity it 
profits nothing. And charity is the love that a 
man has for God. Let nobody think that he can 
be religious without God. Morality is not relig- 
ion 5 there is as much difference between moral- 
ity and religion as there is between a dead man 
and live man. The difference is in that vital 
spark, sometimes called faith, sometimes called 
charity, which brings the soul into conscious re- 
lation with God. 

You may be the most moral man that ever kept 
the last six commandments, but unless you live 
your good life thinking of God, desiring the ap- 
probation and fearing the displeasure of God, 
striving to learn the will of God, and loving God, 
“ one thing thou lackest,” and that a lack so im- 
measurably important that all else is ruined by 
that lack. I do not believe that any child who 
did not care for his father ever really pleased his 
father. Religion is the pleasing of God our 
Father. Morality is the pleasing of one’s self or 
one’s neighbors. The most important fact that 
enters into human life is the fact of the existence 
of God. Without God there is no religion. 

Now, what we want is success in religion. And 
what I desire to say is that success in religion, 


RELIGION ON BUSINESS PRINCIPLES. 155 

like success in business, depends on certain busi- 
ness principles. 

One of these business principles is, that nobody 
can do anything without trying. Nobody can 
make any progress in either business or religion 
without trying. There is no success without at- 
tention. There is no way in this world in which 
to get something for nothing except stealing. 
Whoever wants anything worth having must 
work for it. 

Some people seem to think that the religious 
life will somehow look after itself, that it can get 
along without attention. But men know better 
than that in business. The goods will not sell 
themselves, the bills will not pay themselves; 
there are a thousand things that must be done, 
must be looked after, must be set down in the 
books and added up, must be thought out and 
decided every day. The business man who makes 
a success of business gives his mind to it. Why, 
not even a garden, nor the roof of a house, will 
get along without attention. Whoever would 
make a success of religion must give attention to 
religion. 

That means an endeavor, all day long and 
every day, to please God. It means an applying 
of the test of the approbation of God to every 
detail of our ordinary life. We know pretty well 


156 RELIGION ON BUSINESS PRINCIPLES. 

what sort of things please God. We know that 
telling the honest truth pleases him, and straight- 
forward dealing and brotherly speech, and the en- 
deavor to help those who are down. The Sermon 
on the Mount is not written in the Bible for 
nothing. 

Now, to please God is the purpose of religion 
just as much as money-making is the purpose of 
business. Let us see, then. We know, for exam- 
ple, what kind of words please God just as well 
as we know what kind of bargains make money. 
Do not enter into that sale, because you will lose 
by it. Lose what ? Lose money, lose success in 
business. Do not utter that speech, because you 
will lose by it. Lose what ? Lose character, lose 
the approbation of God, lose success in religion. 
Who will set up a comparison between these 
losses ? Who will balance duty against dollars ? 
Who will do more to keep the good-will of a cus- 
tomer than to keep the good-will of the Lord God 
Almighty ? And yet does everybody shun a bad 
word like a bad bargain ? Are not the children 
of this world wiser sometimes than the children 
of light ? 

Another good business principle, which is just 
as good in religion as it is in business, is this : 
that a man ought to be looking out all the time 
for new ideas, new methods, new improvements, 


RELIGION ON BUSINESS PRINCIPLES. 157 

better conditions. It is not enough that a man 
keep faithfully at work j that never wins any but 
the lowest stages of success. Whoever is content 
with that stays where he is, never gets on. The 
man who gets on is all the time working, not only 
at his business, but at himself. He wants to 
make himself better than his business, and then 
to bring his business up after him. For success 
in anything depends on the man. 

Accordingly, the alert business man keeps his 
eyes open ; nothing in the paper misses him which 
he can turn to account. Every good book which 
deals with his department of industry he reads. 
Wherever he goes he looks around to learn some- 
thing; nothing pleases him better than to get 
into the company of the masters of his trade. 

Now, if any man desires to make a success of 
religion, let him not think that he can attain it in 
any other way than that. The elementary proc- 
esses are just the same. There is a difference in 
gardening between raising wheat and raising 
roses, but they both need the earth and the sun 
and the rain. These are essential conditions. 
And the essential conditions of success in religion 
and in business are identical. 

And yet who does not know men, men of busi- 
ness sense, who seem to have no religious sense 
at all ? Surely they do not wish to make a failure 


158 RELIGION ON BUSINESS PRINCIPLES. 

of religion. Surely they are not disposed to vent- 
ure their immortal souls. But what are they 
doing to make themselves good men of religion 
which can compare with what they are doing daily 
to make themselves good men of business ? Where 
in this supreme interest of human life is that 
search for opportunity and seizure of it ; that hos- 
pitality to new truth, that constant endeavor after 
betterment, that desire to learn, which we see in 
lesser things? These men think that they can 
succeed in religion upon conditions which, in 
every other department of life, mean nothing but 
flat failure. For example, it is notorious that a 
good many bright men are not to be seen in the 
churches. Anybody can make a list in two min- 
utes of active merchants, lawyers, clerks, archi- 
tects, physicians, who are busy and alert every 
day in the week, except Sunday. They do not 
miss a business opportunity once a year, but they 
miss a religious opportunity once every seven 
days. They are active members of every associa- 
tion which touches the business side of their life, 
but you will not find their names on the commu- 
nicant list of any church. They are prominent 
everywhere except in the Christian congrega- 
tion. 

They desire to make the most of their life. 
Every one of them would say that. And they do 


RELIGION ON BUSINESS PRINCIPLES. 159 

not believe that death is the end of life; very 
few of them would say that. They believe that 
life goes on through the gate of death, and only 
gets broader and better on the other side. And 
they know that the next life depends on this life, 
just as surely as to-morrow is built upon to-day. 
And they know that there will be no law cases, 
and no diseases for prescription, and no buying 
and selling, no iron mills or railroads in the world 
to come. The transitory will pass away; only 
the eternal will be of interest in eternity. They 
know that the soul is better than the body, and 
that religion is really of more consequence even 
than money-making. But they are not fulfilling 
the conditions of religious success. 

I do not believe that church-going is by any 
means synonymous with religion. But I know 
that it is a fairly accurate symbol of religion. 
Neither is a thermometer synonymous with heat. 
But there is a good deal of significance in what 
the thermometer says. Church attendance is at 
least the thermometer of religion. And when it 
stands at zero the chances are that religious en- 
thusiasm is pretty cold. People who are inter- 
ested in business are to be seen at the desk or 
behind the counter at their work. And people 
who are really interested in religion are likely to 
be seen at church. That which indicates failure 


160 RELIGION ON BUSINESS PRINCIPLES. 

in business is not a good condition of success in 
religion. 

What we ask, then, of every intelligent man 
who desires to make a success of the best part of 
his life is that he will simply bring some of his 
business principles into religion — at least these 
two, the principle of attention and the principle 
of advancement. Certain it is that no kind of de- 
sirable success can be won anywhere without try- 
ing, and trying hard. We cannot sleep out “our 
own salvation ” j we must u work ” it out. 


THE BORDER OF HIS GARMENT. 


u If I may but touch the border of his gar- 
ment, I shall be whole.” 

A woman who has been sick twelve years, and 
has spent all her money to no purpose paying 
doctors’ bills, may be forgiven for a lack of faith. 
I mean a lack of faith in doctors. 

We must not think that the woman of Caper- 
naum, who came in this evil case to Christ, knew 
him as we know him, or thought of him at all as 
we think of him. To this poor woman Jesus was 
only another doctor — a wonderful doctor, no 
doubt, better than any of the others, but yet a 
doctor ; probably nothing more. He had no halo 
about his head, such as he wears in the old pict- 
ures. He dressed like other men, and spoke like 
other men, and walked like other men along the 
Capernaum street. And yet this woman saw in 
a moment that he was different from all the other 
doctors. It marks the strong impression that 


162 THE BORDER OF HIS GARMENT. 

Jesus made upon this woman’s mind that she 
should have ventured, after that discouraging 
experience, to try again. 

Indeed, as she regarded it, there was no venture 
at all. She was quite sure about it. “ If I may 
but touch the border of his garment, I shall be 
whole.” And the woman was right. She did 
touch the border of his garment and was made 
whole. 

The first thing to think about is that Jesus no- 
ticed this touch upon the border of his garment. 

It all happened, you remember, in a crowd. 
An important citizen of Capernaum, a ruler of 
the synagogue there, by name Jairus, had come to 
the Master, no doubt in haste, running through 
the narrow streets, beseeching him to come and 
save his daughter ; u for he had one only daugh- 
ter, about twelve years of age, and she lay a-dy- 
ing.” And the Master and his disciples started 
with the ruler upon this errand of mercy. And 
the people thronged about him. Capernaum was 
but a little town, where everybody knew every- 
body else. The people in those Eastern countries 
live in the streets. The sidewalk was the daily 
paper at Capernaum, the only one they had. 
And when the ruler of the synagogue, with tears 
in his eyes, went hurrying along the street, every- 
body saw him. And when he came back with the 


THE BORDER OF HIS GARMENT. 


163 


Master in his company, all Capernaum was watch- 
ing ; and they all went on together. The people 
crowded upon him, thronged and pressed him, the 
record says, as Jesus went. 

And in the crowd was this woman. And she 
reached out her hand, thrusting it in, perhaps, 
between the jostling men, and touched him, 
touched just the border of his garment. And at 
once he stopped, and looked about him, and said, 
“Who touched me?” And they answered, natu- 
rally enough, that a dozen people were touching 
him. The crowd was so close about him that he 
had hardly room to walk. And yet he said, 
“Somebody hath touched me.” And then the 
woman came and fell down before him, and told 
all that had happened, how she had touched and 
been healed. Jesus noticed even that little timid 
touch upon the border of his garment. 

The life of the Master is of immeasurable im- 
portance to us in every smallest detail of it, not 
only because it teaches us about duty, but because 
it teaches us about God. God is like J esus. J esus 
came to be the revelation of God. There is no 
mystery about that ; we do not get that out of the 
theologies. Evidently, we may be sure of this, 
that God is at least as good as the best man that 
ever lived. And we know very well that the ideal 
life was lived in Galilee. He that hath seen 


164 


THE BORDER OF HIS GARMENT. 


Christ hath seen the Father. Whoever knows 
Jesns Christ knows God. 

God, especially, is as loving as Christ was. God 
is as attentive as Christ was to the faintest call of 
the most timid disciple. Every touch upon the 
farthest corner of the garment of God, God feels. 
There is nobody so hidden in a crowd as to be 
unseen of God. There is no disciple so obscure, 
so poor, so insignificant, so weak, as to be out of 
the range of the attention of God. The very 
smallest prayer of the very smallest child is heard 
of God. Even the hidden thought, the trembling 
resolution, the unspoken aspiration after better 
love for God, which lies away back in the heart 
and no man ever knows of, is known of God. 

Indeed, that modest touch was esteemed by the 
Master above all the pushing and jostling of the 
multitude. There were men crowding him so 
close that day that he could scarcely stir, who 
were not touching him — in his sense of the word 
— at all. We have got to be close to Christ in 
love and faith in order to touch him. The length 
and the loudness of men’s prayers do not com- 
mend them to the ear of God. People’s profes- 
sions do not count for very much with him. One 
is inclined to wonder if the sanctimonious talk of 
a good many obtrusively pious people is not as 
unpleasing to God as it is to the most of us. Cer- 


THE BORDER OF HIS GARMENT. 165 

tain it is, that those with whom Christ found least 
in common when he lived here, were the people 
who made the most pretensions to religion. Out 
of every service, out of the presence of every 
spiritual opportunity, we go as they went that 
day out of that crowd in Capernaum, some helped 
and some not helped at all. And it will many 
times be found that they who take a blessing with 
them are those who, like the publican, have 
scarce dared to lift up so much as their eyes to 
heaven, or, like the woman, have ventured only 
to touch the border of his garment. 

Another good thing to think about is that Jesus 
rewarded the woman’s touch, not only in spite 
of its faintness, but in spite of all the mistaken 
ideas that were implied in it. 

This woman, as I have already suggested, had 
probably but a blundering notion about Christ. 
She knew not who he was. She had heard that 
he had been going about all that country doing 
good, healing the sick. The great man of the 
neighborhood, the ruler of the synagogue, was 
testifying to his own confidence in the power of 
Christ by calling him to the deathbed of his little 
daughter. It was the talk of the town. And the 
woman had heard it, as we hear to-day of the 
faith cure, — only with a tenfold emphasis. She 
had come out to meet this great physician. 


166 THE BORDER OF HIS GARMENT. 

That was probably the highest thought she had 
about him. It does not appear that there was 
any religion in the woman’s motive, nor any 
spiritual side to it. One thing she knew : that 
she was sick, and that out there in the street, 
coming along past her own house, was the best 
doctor she had ever heard of. She did not even 
pray. She simply touched his clothes. 

The act itself was superstitious. It has a fair 
parallel in the mediaeval adoration of relics. It 
belongs, with the bones of the saints, and the 
wood of the true cross, and the miraculous 
Madonnas, to the materialistic side of faith. It 
has an illustration to-day in the people who are 
crowding to touch the Holy Coat at Treves. That 
was what the woman did. She touched the Holy 
Coat. She said, u If I may but touch the border 
of his garment, I shall be whole.” And wonder 
of wonders ! her touch brought benediction. 

God blesses even the mistaken. One who looks 
over the list of the healed and helped in the life 
of the Master discovers that a great proportion of 
them were people of the most questionable ortho- 
doxy. 

The greatest mistake of all is probably that 
which we ourselves make about the nature of 
faith. It was the woman’s faith which made her 
whole. That is what Christ said. But we look 


THE BORDER OF HIS GARMENT. 167 

in vain through the record of her healing for the 
conventional tests of faith. No metaphysics here j 
no theology apparent, no recitation of any creed. 
Yet these things enter into the common idea of 
faith. Faith, indeed, is not unfrequently con- 
sidered to be made up of just these things and 
little else. Men and women have been burned 
for heresy who have been just as orthodox as she 
who held Christ to be but a human doctor, and 
who touched the border of his garment. People 
who believe in transubstantiation and relic wor- 
ship, and people who do not believe in the theo- 
logical definitions of the divinity of our Lord, are 
alike akin to this woman whose faith Christ 
blessed. If the door into the kingdom of heaven 
opens wide enough for her, it opens wide enough 
for them. There is apparently a difference be- 
tween Christ and some Christians as to the 
nature of faith. 

Faith, if we are to accept the inference of this 
scene in the Capernaum street, is essentially a 
personal allegiance to J esus Christ. Whoever is 
drawn to him from any motive, whoever rever- 
ences and trusts him in any way, touches the 
heart of Christian faith. 

One of the most hopeful signs in the religious 
world to-day is the disposition to simplify the 
idea of faith. The old metaphysical “ confes- 


168 


THE BORDER OF HIS GARMENT. 


sions ” are being recognized as wide of the mark. 
It is getting to be seen that a man might accept, 
and believe, and even enthusiastically teach every 
one of the Thirty-nine Articles, or the whole of 
the Westminster Confession, or the entire Cate- 
chism of the Council of Trent, and yet be only in 
the position of those j ostlers in the crowd, push- 
ing Christ but not “ touching n him ; while another 
man outside the Church, saying “no” to all the 
formularies, putting no trust in any system of the- 
ological metaphysics, but simply trying to do the 
will of Christ, might, like this woman, win the 
blessing of the Master. We are turning away, as 
she did, from the doctors — in our case, the theo- 
logical doctors — and we are seeking only Christ. 
We will get health for our souls in that direc- 
tion, in no other. 

We have been setting ourselves, I am afraid, 
to be stricter than Christ, narrower than Christ, 
more Christian than Christ. The twelve apostles 
could not pass the entrance examination into 
some Christian churches. There is no need, I 
think, to be more orthodox than Christ. 

One more good thing to think about in this 
woman's story is the fact that Jesus, though he 
was content with a very simple faith, was not 
content without an open confession of that faith. 

He stopped and looked about him in the crowd, 


THE BORDER OF HIS GARMENT. 


169 


and said, “Who touched me?” He waited till 
the woman who was healed came and declared 
herself. She was already healed. The blessing 
of health had been given her in all abundance. 
But that was not the end of it. She must come 
trembling, and fall down before him, and declare 
unto him before all the people for what cause she 
had touched him, and how she was healed imme- 
diately. And he must send her away with his 
word of blessing: “Daughter, be of good com- 
fort, thy faith hath made thee whole: go in 
peace.” 

The parallel with this in our spiritual life is 
what we call “ joining the Church.” It is not to 
get an added blessing that we make that open 
confession of Christian allegiance $ though there 
is an added blessing, too. The supreme blessing 
has already come. Out of some sickness, out of 
some sorrow, out of some new sense of spiritual 
need, we have looked into the face of Jesus, we 
have recognized Jesus. We have been spending 
our money to no purpose with the physicians. 
We have called in the doctors of philosophy and 
the doctors of divinity. And they have prescribed 
for us. They have given us doses of metaphysics 
hard to swallow. And they have not helped us 
at all. And at last we have turned to Christ, to 
the real, personal Christ, to the supreme spiritual 


170 


THE BORDER OF HIS GARMENT. 


Master of the simple gospel. We may know very 
little about him ; we may be as mistaken as this 
woman 5 but we have known enough to be as 
sure as she was that he can help us. And we 
have reached out our hands to him, and touched, 
it may be, only the border of his garment. And 
Christ has helped us. We have said to ourselves, 
“At least I can be thus much of a Christian ; I 
can try to make the will of Christ the standard 
of my daily life ; I can try to live in my town 
as he lived in Capernaum.” And so we have got 
the blessing of strength. Or we have said, “At 
least I can do this ; I can take his word as the 
way out of the darkness. God is my loving 
Father; my dear ones who are out of sight are 
in his tender keeping, and I shall meet them, for 
he said so. Jesus, who knows so much more than 
I ever can about all these mysteries, said that. 
And I believe it.” And so we have got the bless- 
ing of comfort. 

Then what shall we do ? Why, then, confess 
him before men. Did that make the woman any 
better in her body? Probably not: she was 
cured already. Will that make us any better in 
our souls ? Perhaps not. The supreme blessing 
to our souls has come already. But Jesus asks 
it. It is an act of open acknowledgment and 
gratitude which we owe to him. That is one part 


THE BORDER OF HIS GARMENT. 171 

of it. And it is a testimony to him which may 
help our neighbor. That is another part of it. 
These are two great reasons for the confession of 
Christ: because we love him, and because we 
want to help our brother. 

If Jesus has brought us strength in temptation, 
comfort in sorrow, silence does not befit us. We 
may not stay back unnoticed in the crowd, making 
no sign, uttering no acknowledgment, letting him 
go on without a word. It is not a very great 
thing which he asks of us in return for his im- 
measurable blessing. It is the most reasonable, 
the most fitting, the most natural thing in the 
world. He asks us to declare unto him before all 
the people how we have touched him and been 
healed. 

And that will help our neighbor. The doctors 
do not advertise in the newspapers. The doctor’s 
advertisements are his patients. The doctor’s 
practice grows, as one tells another how the doc- 
tor helped him. The Great Physician gets new 
patients in like manner. Christianity grows in 
the world by the influence of personal testimony. 
Every good man who has discovered a great 
truth, who has found a way to help, wants to tell 
somebody else. 

The Christian is not content till he has made 
somebody else Christian. People want proof of 


172 


THE BORDER OF HIS GARMENT. 


the Christian religion, and the best proof is to be 
seen not in a book, but in a life ; not in a contro- 
versy, but in a character • not in a creed, but in 
a Christian. I know that Christ helped me : that 
one sentence outweighs all the intellectual argu- 
ments for religion. It is the invincible argument 
of personal experience. This at least is true. 
And if this be true, all the rest matters little. 
The supreme helpfulness of the personal Christ 
is the one truth whose recognition makes religion. 
Every man or woman who bears testimony to this 
blessed and realized helpfulness of Christ helps 
somebody else. We all want help. We are all 
looking for it. Here it is in the hand of Christ. 
That is what the act of joining the Church testi- 
fies to. That is the benefit of a confession of 
allegiance. 


THE GREAT COMMANDMENT. 


We are all clients of the lawyer who came to 
Christ with that deep question, Which is the 
great commandment in the law ? He represents 
us when he asks that. We all want to know that. 

It is true that the lawyer asked the question 
according to his legal habit, not for his own in- 
formation, but, as we would say, for the informa- 
tion of the jury. The jury was the crowd of cit- 
izens and countrymen who were gathered about 
the Master in the Temple. Some were on his 
side ; some were against him. There was a great 
discussion going on about him. The Sadducees 
had had their turn at questioning him, thinking 
to bring discredit upon his teachings j and his 
wisdom had put them to silence. And now came 
the Pharisees, with the lawyer at their head, 
“ tempting” him, the record tells us — that is, put- 
ting him to test, setting him on trial, trying to 
catch him in his answers. There was no religion 
in the question of the lawyer. Here is no eager 


174 THE GREAT COMMANDMENT. 

disciple running to the Master, demanding what 
he should do to inherit eternal life. There was 
no thought of discipleship in the lawyer’s heart. 

There is always this possibility of wide distance 
between theology and religion. The discussion 
of doctrine, the determining of duty, may be no 
more religious than the transactions of the Stock 
Exchange. The distinction between the sacred 
and the secular does not depend on the subjects 
that men talk about, nor on the places where men 
meet to talk about them, nor on the profession or 
the position of the debaters. An election is not 
made sacred by the fact that the people are vot- 
ing for a bishop, nor is it made secular by the 
fact that the people are voting for a congressman. 
A good many political speeches have been really 
more religious than a good many sermons. We 
must not think that people are religious — either 
ourselves or others — because they talk a great 
deal about religion. They may be just as much 
opposed to that which is best in religion as this 
questioning lawyer. 

The difference between the sacred and the sec- 
ular is altogether a difference of spirit. That is 
what God looks at and cares for. We read that 
one day at the Feast of Pentecost the Holy Spirit 
passed by the splendid Temple altogether, and 
overlooked the high-priest in his gorgeous vest- 


THE GREAT COMMANDMENT. 175 

merits, and chose rather to visit a common house 
somewhere in the city — just an ordinary house, 
with a flat roof and a courtyard, and a pair of 
stairs on the outside, like a thousand others — and 
to grant his special benediction to a company of 
common people there assembled in their working- 
clothes. It is the heart that makes men worthy 
or unworthy in the sight of God, and not the 
pious lips. 

This is a significant figure, this lawyer stand- 
ing in Christ’s presence, looking straight into his 
face, questioning him, listening with respectful 
attention to his answer, and having within him 
not one smallest trace of the faintest purpose to 
follow what the Master said. At the best, he had 
an intellectual interest in Christianity, nothing 
more. There was a gambler in New York who, it 
seems, had for years attended a Christian service 
every Sunday. He never knelt down, he said, 
nor answered “Amen n to any of the prayers. He 
had never joined the Church, nor had he ever 
made any difference in his real living. He said 
that he went to that church because he liked the 
preacher ; he considered him the finest preacher 
in the city of New York ! There are people not 
so bad as that in all the churches. They show an 
interest in religion by their constant presence, as 
this lawyer showed his interest by his presence 


176 THE GREAT COMMANDMENT. 

and his question. And they listen, like the 
lawyer, to all the praying and the preaching. 
And they go away, a hundred times a year, and 
one year after another, and never make a change 
in their living, never get any closer than they 
were at the beginning to Christian discipleship — 
at least, so far as we can see; nobody knows 
what God sees. 

And yet there are times in every life when the 
lawyer’s question is asked in earnest, not as the 
lawyer asked it. The “ great commandment,” — 
what is it but the divine ideal of that which is 
the first and chief essential in human character ? 
When we learn it we know what God cares 
most for in the temper and disposition of his 
children. We discover what our heavenly Father 
most desires to see in us. And we all want 
to discover that. That is the discovery of dis- 
coveries. 

For we are all of us honestly discontented. 
The better we are, the less are we satisfied with 
ourselves. Not one of us but has some sort of 
vision of a higher life, and is aware of the dis- 
tance between that vision and the every-day real- 
ity. We know what kind of men and women we 
should like to be. But our ideal changes. Some- 
times it is but a low achievement that we find 
ourselves striving after. We think that money 


THE GREAT COMMANDMENT. 177 

may, perhaps, content ns j we will be satisfied if 
we can but gain some sort of worldly prize. It 
is evident enough that some people seem to have 
no higher ambition than such as this. They bend 
all things this way. They appear to be willing 
any day to trade a heavenly mansion for a good 
stone house on a salable corner. 

On the other hand, in proportion as men and 
women keep the will of God, so their ideal of 
right living is more and more uplifted. Char- 
acter is seen to be the richest of all treasures. 

Now what we want, with our ideals going up 
and down like the mercury in a thermometer ac- 
cording as our zeal is hot or cold, is to know what 
the standard is. We want something to measure 
by. And we do not need anybody to teach us 
that the one accurate judge of human life is he 
who set human life a-going in this world. That 
alone is best which is accounted best by God. 

And so we come in good earnest to the law- 
yer’s question. When we are honest with our- 
selves, when we stand up and look out into the 
interminable sky, when we contemplate the cer- 
tain end of this life and the mysterious beginning 
of another, and realize that in spite of all the 
noise and jostle of the busy day we are still alone 
with God, and must give account of ourselves to 
God, — then we ask in all soberness what God 


178 


THE GREAT COMMANDMENT. 


thinks of this human life of ours. What is the 
divine standard of man’s behavior ? What is of 
value and worth while in the sight of God? 
What is the great commandment in the law of 
God? 

And who can teach us that ? Surely the great 
spiritual Master. No man ever spake, nor will 
speak, like this man. Christ knows more than 
we do about God. Who will deny that ? Christ 
knows more than all the preachers, and all the 
philosophers, and all the magazines, and all the 
books, about the mind and the will of God, — 
Christ the manifestation, the speaking revelation, 
the actual incarnation of God. Even on the low- 
est ground, the holiest man is always the wisest 
in spiritual things. Any man ought to know 
most about that which he studies the most. And 
knowledge of spiritual things, above all other 
knowledge, depends upon sympathy of spirit. 
The pure in heart shall see God : that is one of 
the essential axioms. To whom shall we go ? who 
else has the words of eternal life save the spirit- 
ual Master, the one ideal, pure, perfect saint and 
hero of all time ? 

I emphasize that, because the answer which 
Christ gave to the lawyer’s question is not the com- 
monly accepted answer. “Thou shalt love the 
Lord thy God with all thy heart, and all thy soul, 


THE GREAT COMMANDMENT. 


179 


and all thy mind.” That, he said, is the first and 
great commandment. But we are inclined to 
doubt that. Ask any dozen men their real opin 
ion, and we will find that ten of them will hold 
that the best that man can do is to do right, to 
live honestly, to help his neighbor, and to do his 
daily duty. The best of life, in the judgment of 
a large proportion of the readers of this sermon, 
is morality rather than religion. It is better that 
we should love our neighbor than that we should 
love the Lord God Almighty. One of the best 
men I know said to me the other day in a letter, 
“You know that I belong to a family that is more 
noted for their honesty than for religion, and 
personally, while not claiming much of the former, 
I frankly admit to having little or none of the lat- 
ter.” And, evidently, the difference here intended 
between honesty and religion is that honesty looks 
toward our fellow-men, while religion looks first 
of all to God. 

Now the most important fact anywhere in the 
circumference of truth is the fact of the existence 
of God. The most important being — incalcula- 
bly the most important — in the whole universe, 
in the whole range of life, is God. God made us ; 
God set us in our places in the great brotherhood 
of man ; God gave us all that we have of heart, 
of soul, of mind, of strength; God keeps us in 


180 THE GREAT COMMANDMENT. 

being ; to God we go at the last. No man made 
himself ; and no man has lived long in this world 
without becoming aware that he is set in the 
midst of vast, mysterious, uncontrollable forces. 
Nature is but the garment of God. All motion 
is but the movement of God. Back of every fact 
in nature, in history, and in human experience, 
we come to God. And after death is God. The 
first step in the argument is the human soul ; and 
that means the divine soul, God ; and God must 
be supreme. Over all, and in all, is God. 

Christ said that the most important thought 
that anybody can think is a thought about God ; 
and that the supreme human duty is our duty 
toward God. Whoever leaves God out of his reck- 
oning goes adrift inevitably. It is more impor- 
tant, immeasurably, to reverence, to fear, and to 
love God than it is to tell the truth, and to con- 
duct an honest business, to visit the fatherless 
and the widows in their affliction, or to keep our- 
selves unspotted from the world. No amount of 
obedience paid to the last six commandments can 
make up for any man’s neglect of the first four. 
No amount of devotion to the second of the two 
commandments of the gospel can take the place 
of disregard of the first. No man is living a right 
life, no matter how upright or how honorable, 


THE GREAT COMMANDMENT. 181 

who lays the emphasis of his endeavors upon 
honesty, and is contented to let religion go. You 
may think of your neighbors all day long, and 
spend your whole time in the effort to be a helper 
and an uplifter, a bringer of good into the dark 
places of a bad world ; you may be the best of 
benefactors, the most public-spirited of citizens, 
the most devoted of all men in your love for your 
family, perfectly straightforward, immaculately 
honorable, the soul of virtue, the mirror of all 
human graces, — but if you leave God out, do not 
think of God, do not pray to him or worship him, 
do not love God, you have, after all, left out that 
element of human life that gives it value. Your 
life is like a clock without an hour-hand j all that 
busy ticking simply does not count. 

That is a hard saying. But you know the em- 
phasis that is laid in the Bible upon faith. Again 
and again in various ways we are earnestly as- 
sured and warned that without faith it is impos- 
sible to please God. And faith — what is faith? 
Not an acceptance of the statements of the theo- 
logians. No ; faith finds a good definition in the 
u great commandment.” That is what it is; to 
do that — to love God with all the heart and soul 
and mind. Faith, whatever meaning we attach 
to it, is pre-eminently concerned with God. That 


182 


THE GREAT COMMANDMENT. 


is perfectly evident. Nobody will say that faith 
and morality are the same thing. Faith is the 
heart of religion. 

It is, of course, as plain as day that the fruit of 
faith is all manner of good living. Nobody can 
possibly believe in God and love God without de- 
siring in everything to please God. And God has 
left us in no doubt that there is no way in which 
we can please him better than by keeping his com- 
mandments, by doing his will. 

And the supreme commandment which follows 
that which sets our love toward God prompts us 
to love our neighbor as ourselves. It is, indeed, 
impossible in the nature of things to love God 
without loving our neighbor, to have faith with- 
out works. The very sign and proof of divine 
love is human love. No man is a godly man un- 
less he is a good man. So strong is the bond, 
indeed, between faith and works, between good- 
ness and godliness, that we hope that the fruit is 
a proof of the planting of the right -seed, that the 
good life indicates a good heart, and that the man 
who really loves his brother loves his heavenly 
Father also. 

But the difference between the second of the 
commandments of the gospel and the first lies just 
in this : that God looks at the heart rather than 
at the hands, accounts the motive as the part of 


THE GREAT COMMANDMENT. 


183 


the deed which determines its value, and cares 
supremely for man’s love. The distinction be- 
tween two good deeds which sets one immeasur- 
ably above the other in the estimation of God is 
that one good deed is done for the pleasure of 
the doer, while the other good deed is done for 
the pleasure of God. One man did his good deed, 
never thinking about God at all, leaving God alto- 
gether out, as if there were no God. The other 
did his good deed desiring to please God, because 
it was the will of God, out of love for God. 

That is not hard to understand. Every father 
and mother knows the difference between an obe- 
dience which is meant to please them and an obe- 
dience which disregards them altogether. The 
parent desires the love of the child, wants the 
heart of the child, measures the value of obedience 
by the love that lies behind it. And so does God. 

That is why the love of God is the subject of 
the great commandment. Because God, as J esus 
Christ revealed him to us, stands in a personal 
relation to us, a relation of which that between a 
parent and a child is but a faint symbol; God 
loves us, every one of us unspeakably. And God 
wants us to love him. No wonder that without 
faith it is impossible to please him. God is for- 
ever looking out for love. God forever finds a 
lack in every deed which shows no love. Out of 


184 THE GREAT COMMANDMENT. 

all that we can give him this he sets highest, that 
we love him. 

Do not think that God has no love for the un- 
loving, that he turns in the least from any man 
who looks out and not up, and loves his neighbor 
more than he loves his Father. Do not think 
that God does not take account of every good 
thing that he can possibly find in the remotest 
corner of the most forgetful heart. God knows 
the whole soul of every man that breathes. God 
alone can tell — better even than the man himself 
can — how much real love for him is hidden away 
in the deeds of a man’s life. 

But do not think that God will ever care more 
for a man’s money than he does for his motive ; 
that he will ever look at the outside and not at 
the inside ; that he will ever exalt a man’s love 
for his little circle of temporary neighbors above 
the love which he himself asks of the heart and 
soul and mind of every man ; that he will ever 
reverse the order of the two great command- 
ments, and set morality in the place of religion. 

Wonder of wonders, that God should so love 
us ! What is there in the world more wonder- 
ful, — except the faintness of our love for him ? 


PETER AND JUDAS. 


These two sentences are set down close to- 
gether in St. Matthew's record of the first Good 
Friday: “ Peter went out and wept bitterly.” 
“Judas went and hanged himself” 

Each of these men had a chapter in his life 
which contained the story of a black sin. Be- 
tween the man who betrays his master and the 
man who denies him there is a difference, but not 
a very great difference. One is about as bad as 
the other. 

Indeed, there has been more said in the defense 
of Judas than of Peter. Judas, some people 
think, made a mistake in judgment. He was in 
a hurry — could not wait j whatever was going to 
happen, he wanted it to happen now. The king- 
dom of heaven was coming, Christ said, coming in 
its own good time. But in the opinion of Judas 
it was not coming fast enough. Sometimes it 
seemed as if it were not coming at all. Day by, 
day the cause of the Prophet of Nazareth seemed 


186 


PETER AND JUDAS. 


to be losing ground. Judas saw that plainly. It 
was as incomprehensible to Judas as it was to 
Christ’s unbelieving brethren, that anybody who 
desired as he did to win the world should not 
show himself openly to the world. Judas wanted 
a great spectacular, faith-compelling miracle ; and 
he conceived the idea that if the Master were 
once set in such a position that a choice was 
necessary between death and a public declaration 
of his kingship, there would be enacted such a 
sign and wonder in the eyes of Jerusalem that all 
opposition would be silenced and Christ would 
be set upon the throne of the nation. So he con- 
sented to play traitor. So he gave up his Master 
into the hands of his enemies. And the faith- 
compelling miracle did not happen, and the de- 
cisive word was not spoken, and Judas found 
that instead of that was shame, and insult, and 
spitting, and the scourge, and the cross. And he 
flung down his infamous wages upon the temple 
pavement, and went and hanged himself. 

It is not by any means certain that the apostles 
defended Judas in this fashion. He betrayed his 
Master, and he went “ to his own place,” wherever 
that was, and beyond that the apostles tell us 
very little. We can only hope, in charity, that 
this explanation of that black sin may have some 
light of truth in it. Anyhow, it is the best that 


PETER AND JUDAS. 


187 


can be said for Judas. And it is more than can 
be said for Peter. Peter was afraid. The soldiers 
got about him in the guard-room with loud, 
threatening voices, and the man was scared for 
his life. And he declared with the emphasis of 
an appeal to God, taking his oath upon it, that he 
was no disciple of Jesus of Nazareth, had no con- 
nection with him nor care for him, and had never 
so much as looked into his face before that night. 
And Jesus came out from the presence of his 
enemies, and heard that speech, heard his own 
friend, one of the three whom he had taken 
closest to his heart, cast him out, reject him, and 
deny him. Pontius Pilate was a better man that 
day than Peter. Even Judas did not betray his 
Master to save his own life j had no use for his 
life further when he learned what his betrayal 
really meant. 

Judas went and hanged himself. That was 
more than Peter did. Peter went out and wept 
bitterly, felt very badly about it. But there is a 
good deal of difference between putting a handker- 
chief to one’s eyes and putting a rope about one’s 
neck. Ought not Peter to have imitated Judas ? 

The question is, What shall a man do who has 
committed a great sin? Shall he go out and 
weep bitterly, and then try to make up for his 
offense, and be a decent man again ? or shall he 


188 


PETER AND JUDAS. 


go and hang himself ? A man can hang h imself 
without a rope. He can imitate Judas without 
getting buried in a potter’s field. He can go 
hanged through the rest of a long life — that is, 
he can make himself absolutely miserable, torture 
his soul, put his conscience in the rack every 
night, and break his heart on the wheel. He can 
commit spiritual suicide. Now, which is the best 
example, the apostle with the tearful eyes or the 
apostle with the broken neck? The alternative 
is between hope and despair. 

That such a question is not a needless one, nor 
far removed from the common life of living men, 
is testified by a letter which came to me the other 
day 5 a letter unsigned and undated ; the writer 
of it is wholly unknown to me. The letter asks 
this question : 

“Can one sin” — my correspondent wants to 
know — “one sin, the result of a fevered and 
diseased mind, committed by a person whose en- 
tire life up to the time of its commitment had 
been one earnest labor and care for others, and 
whose life since has been one long, severe struggle 
to root out the memory and live an earnest life — 
can this sin be forgiven, so that even in this life 
some gladness may come ? Can an act committed 
under the above-mentioned circumstances be 
called a sin ? If not, why is there no way in this 


PETER AND JUDAS. 


189 


world of proving it, so that the life may not be a 
perfect wreck to the one who has so sinned ? ” 

It seems to me that this is exactly the same 
question which was in the mind of Peter and of 
Judas when they came to realize the fearful mean- 
ing of betrayal and denial. They had each of 
them committed a sin no doubt a thousand times 
greater than the one referred to in this letter. 
And they said, each of them in the deep of his 
heart, And now, what shall I do ? Is there any 
pardon for my sin ? And one answered, Yes, and 
the other answered, No. Everybody must see 
which answer was the right one. Peter found 
out presently that Christ was most infinitely for- 
giving j and Peter was a good man and a helpful 
man and a happy man all the rest of his life. 
Judas did not wait to find out, did not dare to 
try to find out, gave up at once in absolute 
despair, and went and hanged himself. 

The question of forgiveness is a question be- 
tween the soul and God. Whether God will for- 
give one sin or a hundred sins that a man has 
done depends partly upon the man and partly 
upon God. 

So far as forgiveness depends upon God, we 
can judge of God's willingness to forgive by 
learning about God, about his character, about 
his disposition toward us. And we can learn 


190 


PETER AND JUDAS. 


something about that by studying our own hearts, 
because God made us like himself. The best that 
is in man is a true revelation of the character of 
God. The prophet Hosea made a great discovery 
once about God. Hosea had had the unspeakable 
misfortune to marry an unworthy wife. His wife 
left him and went off into all manner of abomin- 
able living. At last, one day he came upon her 
in the most abject poverty, set in the market-place 
to be sold as a slave. And Hosea bought her and 
took her home. And when Hosea looked into his 
heart he found that after all he loved his wife. 
In spite of years of pain and shame, in spite of 
all her sin, still Hosea loved his wife. And then 
it came to him like a revelation out of the sky, 
that in looking into his own heart he was looking 
also into the heart of God. For was he better 
than God ? If he loved his sinful wife did not 
God also love his sinful people ? 

There is a poem of Robert Browning’s — 
“Saul” — which teaches that same true lesson. 
Be sure that God’s love is more patient and more 
tender, and God’s forgiveness wider and deeper 
than any man’s : 

“ For the love of God is broader 

Than the measures of man’s mind, 

And the heart of the Eternal 
Is most wonderfully kind.” 


PETER AND JUDAS. 


191 


We learn still more about God by studying the 
revelation of him in the life and words of Jesus 
Christ. Christ taught us that God is our Father. 
Make that a test of all theology. Nothing is true 
which contradicts the fatherhood of God. God 
will never do anything which we cannot recon- 
cile with the wisest and most tender fatherhood. 
God never thinks one thought about the most 
abandoned sinner which the ideal father would 
not think about his wandering boy. The parable 
of the prodigal son contains the Christian reve- 
lation of God. 

Christ tells us over and over, in parable and 
miracle, in prayer and sermon, of the love of God, 
of the longing of God to have all who have turned 
away from him turn back, and of the perpetual 
and instant and abundant welcome which waits 
upon repentance. Is there not more joy in heaven 
over one sinner that repenteth than over ninety 
and nine just persons that need no repentance ? 
Did not God so love the world that he gave his 
only-begotten Son that whosoever believeth in 
him should not perish ? Christ’s whole mission 
from Bethlehem to Calvary, what was it but a 
declaration of God’s love for sinners ? He came 
to bind up the broken-hearted, to make hope out 
of despair, to assure us of the forgiveness of God. 

It is true that there are certain classes of per- 


192 


PETER AND JUDAS. 


sons to whom forgiveness seems to be denied. 
For example, there are those who refuse to for- 
give. The measure of God’s forgiveness is the 
width and breadth and depth of our own forgive- 
ness of our neighbors. A man comes, in a para- 
ble, who, like the writer of this letter, is burdened 
with a great debt. He asks that his debt, an 
enormous sum, may be forgiven him. His mas- 
ter listens and forgives. The case is exactly such 
a one as is submitted to us, only worse. And 
the offender is forgiven. Then he goes out and 
refuses to forgive a little debt which his brother 
owes him, and the master puts him into prison. 
It seems as if God were willing to forgive almost 
any sin except the refusal to forgive. 

There are also the self-righteous people, who 
are not at all worried about their sins, but are 
disposed, on the contrary, to thank God that they 
are so particularly good. Against these people 
Christ said words of strong indignation. Christ 
was always very tender of sinners who realized 
their sin, but he found nothing in common with 
Pharisees and hypocrites. The people who are 
set off to the left of the great white throne, in the 
Lord’s picture of the Day of Judgment, are those 
who say, When did I ever do anything wrong ? 
There is never a word of threatening for a man 
who knows his sin and is sorry for it. 


PETER AND JUDAS. 


193 


Something ought, perhaps, to be said here about 
the Unpardonable Sin. There is one sin which 
is a sin unto death ; no use praying for such a 
sinner; no forgiveness awaiting such a sinner 
either in this world or in the next. Every con- 
ceivable sin may be pardoned and done away with 
save only this. Now, what is this Unpardonable 
Sin ? It is described as being an offense against 
the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost is God speak- 
ing in a man’s conscience. Sin against the Holy 
Ghost is sin committed against a man’s own clear 
knowledge of the difference between good and 
bad. It is a deliberate, considered, and willing 
choice of known iniquity. It is the act of a man 
who calls good evil, and evil good. It is an actual 
preference of darkness for light. 

More than that, it is this sin persisted in and 
never repented of. For the promise to repentance 
is absolute and unconditional : “ Him that com- 
eth to me I will in no wise cast out.” The man 
who commits the Unpardonable Sin makes it un- 
pardonable by never seeking pardon. He has no 
desire for pardon, no regret, no stings of an un- 
easy conscience. The conscience of the sinner of 
the Unpardonable Sin is dead. Nobody who has 
the least longing to escape from sin has fallen into 
the Unpardonable Sin; for that longing is evi- 
dence that the Spirit of God is still persuading 


194 


PETER AND JUDAS. 


him. The Spirit of God has no longer any word 
to say to the sinner of the sin without a pardon. 

The writer of this letter does not belong to 
either of these three classes in whose case for- 
giveness is in doubt. If the man who owed ten 
thousand talents could be forgiven, if the prodi- 
gal son could take his place again in the house- 
hold, if Peter could be numbered again with the 
apostles, there is surely no reason for despair. 

So far as man’s part in forgiveness is concerned, 
all that God asks is that the man turn back, be 
sorry, and amend his life. Whosoever does that 
needs no sign out of the sky to assure him of the 
pardon of the Father. He is forgiven. All that 
he needs now is to set that sin resolutely behind 
him as a part of the dead past, and go on. A 
good many people are like the rich man’s brothers 
in the parable : they want somebody to come back 
from the dead, or some other very wonderful and 
unusual thing to happen, that they may be as- 
sured of the truth of the word of God. But God 
does not grant that sort of wish. God has told 
us in the person of his Son, and it is written plain 
in his Holy Word, that he is our loving Father, 
ready to forgive, forever waiting to be gracious, 
asking only that we love him and try to do his 
will. 

Every repentant sinner is forgiven. The answer 


PETER AND JUDAS. 


195 


to the letter is not only that that sin can be for- 
given, but that it has been forgiven. If it came 
out of a diseased mind, God knows that, and sets 
the boundaries of responsibility, and makes all 
possible allowance, wider than we make. And 
though the mind had not been diseased at all, save 
with the disease of sin, the sorrow afterward, and 
the amendment, would have brought divine for- 
giveness. God has forgiven you. That is the 
end of it. 

Follow Peter and not Judas. The best and 
happiest part of Peter’s life was after that sin. 
So it may be in your life. All stirring up of 
that old memory, all transferring of that unfort- 
unate past into the living present, I will tell you 
what it is like: it is like a soldier who has 
stumbled on the march sitting down and spending 
the rest of that day lamenting that stumble, in- 
stead of going on and fighting better to make up 
for it. It is like a disobedient child who is sorry 
afterward and repents, and his father forgives 
him, and then the child spends a whole week 
moping and mourning over that forgiven sin. 
Doesn’t that look as if the child doubted the en- 
tireness of the father’s pardon and the reality of 
his love ? You don’t want him to go about day 
after day with tears in his eyes, do you 1 Neither 
does our Father in heaven. 


196 


PETER AND JUDAS. 


God wants us to remember our past forgiven 
sins only as reasons for carefulness and as reasons 
for gratitude. He does not want us to go about 
with hearts drying up and minds paralyzed, grop- 
ing in the dark. And if we really believe what 
God says, we will not do that. “ Come unto me 
all ye that are weary and heavy laden, and I will 
give you rest.” “ When the wicked man turneth 
away from his wickedness that he hath committed, 
and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall 
save his soul alive.” “ If we confess our sins, God 
is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to 
cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” u And their 
sins and their iniquities will I remember no more.” 
Let us forget what God in his mercy has long 
since forgiven and forgotten. 


SERVING GOD FOR NAUGHT. 


11 If God will keep me in the way that I go and 
will give me bread to eat and raiment to pnt on, 
so that I come again to my father’s house in 
peace, then shall the Lord be my God.” 

That was the bargain which Jacob made with 
God. Jacob was just then running away from 
the consequences of one over-cunning bargain, and 
it came to pass as he stopped to say his prayers that 
the phrases of trade crept in among the phrases 
of petition. And he tried to make a contract with 
God. He was like some men who come to church 
to-day and plan their Monday work in prayer 
time, and do sums in mental arithmetic during 
the sermon. Even that is better than to imitate 
the people of the parable who went their ways, 
one to his farm, another to his merchandise, an- 
other to his leisure at home, another to the ac- 
counts at the store, and miss the service alto- 
gether. 

Jacob was a shrewd and crafty money-maker. 


198 


SERVING GOD FOR NAUGHT. 


Even religion, he thought, might be made to min- 
ister to a man’s material advancement. If God 
would give him bread to eat and raiment to put 
on, if God would build him a good house and 
furnish it, if God would give him a fair measure 
of success in his mercantile adventurings, why, 
then, for his part, he would be perfectly willing 
to recite his prayers, and sing his praises, and be 
on the side of God. So much prosperity, so much 
praise ; so much wealth, so much worship. “ Then 
shall the Lord be my God.” It would be a paying 
bargain. It would be worth while. 

That was the idea of God which that Saxon 
priest of Odin had who listened to the good bishop 
Paulinus as he preached the promises of the new 
religion and said: “The old gods have profited 
me little. These long years have I served them, 
no man more diligently, and yet many are richer 
and more prosperous than I am. I will try the 
new.” And thereat he rode full-tilt into Odin’s 
temple, and with his lance tumbled the great 
statue of the god over into the dust. 

That was the idea which men had of God in 
those days, when the favorite deity among the 
Romans was that fickle goddess Fortuna. There 
are no more pathetic and significant relics of that 
old religion than the little battered and broken 
altars dedicated to Fortune. “Let us say our 


SERVING GOD FOR NAUGHT. 


199 


prayers,” men said, “ to the great god, Good Luck. 
Let us get him to give us this and that.” Toward 
the end nothing remained of that ancient faith 
but this — a serving of the gods to ward off evil 
and to get good. 

To-day “the negro of Guinea beats his gods 
when they do not gratify his wishes, and the New 
Zealander threatens to kill and eat them.” In- 
deed it was the opinion of the devil in that won- 
derful play of “ Job,” that godliness everywhere 
was merely for the sake of gain. In comes Satan 
among the sons of God, weary with a long jour- 
ney. He has been going to and fro in the earth, 
and walking up and down in it. “ And the Lord 
said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant 
Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a 
perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God 
and escheweth evil? Then Satan answered the 
Lord, and said, Doth Job fear God for naught?” 

It was the opinion of the devil that any man 
will serve God so long as he gets good pay for it. 
If the Lord gives him bread to eat and raiment to 
put on, any man will choose the Lord for his God. 
But let adversity come, and then see ! Doth any 
man serve God for naught ? 

I am afraid that Jacob’s bargain has its paral- 
lels in Christian communities. I am afraid that 
the devil’s sneering question must in some in- 


200 


SERVING GOD FOR NAUGHT. 


stances be answered in the devil’s way. The most 
evident instances are, of course, to be looked for 
in connection with the great troubles of life. 
Adversity comes, and it is not every one that 
meets it as faithfully as Job did. People lose 
their money, or they lose their health, or they lose 
their friends; and then because they are poor, 
or sick, or full of loneliness or sorrow, they lose 
their faith. They begin to stay away from the 
sacrament, and to be missed out of their places 
in church, and presently they are found to say 
that God does not care for them, and perhaps 
there is no God at all. If there is a God, why do 
they suffer ? Why does he not send prosperity ? 
What is God for if not to help us? A God who 
does not serve us, why should we serve him ? 

That was not what Job said. No doubt there 
were plenty of imperfections in Job’s religion, but 
at least it was not founded upon selfishness. It 
was not built upon that shifting sand. It was 
not constructed out of such materials that it stood 
up and made a brave show in the sunshine, and 
toppled over and went to pieces when it rained. 
Job said, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust 
him.” Jacob said, “If he pay me, then will I 
trust him.” There is some difference ! 

It is said that in these days the commercial 
spirit of the time has got into religion ; that Jacob 


SERVING GOD FOR NAUGHT. 


201 


is still bargaining with God ; and this not only 
in the great adversities which try men’s souls, but 
in lesser matters, in some of the ordinary duties 
of the Christian life. Thus there is a general 
complaint among the clergy that people nowadays 
must be paid for everything. 

Jacob will give money for Christian uses, he 
will help the cause of missions, he will assist the 
poor, he will do his part in building the church 
and maintaining the parish if you pay him, if you 
get up a great supper and give him something 
good to eat, or a concert and let him hear sweet 
music. Jacob will come to church if he is well 
paid for coming, if there is a popular preacher 
and a fine choir. Provide enough “attraction,” 
make the services “taking,” “interesting,” and 
not too religious, and Jacob will never miss a 
meeting. 

“ If God will keep me in the way that I go, and 
will give me bread to eat and raiment to put on, 
so that I come again to my father’s house, then 
shall the Lord be my God.” 

But we ought to think a great deal more about 
what we owe to God than about what God owes 
to us. The central fact of our religion ought to 
be the fact of God rather than the fact of self. 
The sovereignty of God and the smallness of man, 
the omnipotence of God and the weakness of 


202 


SERVING GOD FOR NAUGHT. 


man, the inexpressible pre-eminence of God, we 
ought to think of. It used to be asked of 
converts in a certain Christian Church if they 
so set God first that they were even willing, if 
it were for God’s glory, to be forever damned. 
That is a strong way of putting it. But there 
is a great truth underlying that grim question 
nevertheless. It is an essential condition of Chris- 
tianity to look utterly away from self toward 
God. 

There are, accordingly, two words which we all 
need to emphasize in our religious life. One 
word is duty, the other is devotion. There are a 
great many things which we ought to do, whether 
they are pleasing to us or not, simply because they 
are among our duties. I fear that the good word 
“ duty ” has not the place which it should have in 
the vocabulary of modern life. People live in the 
direction of their inclinations. Whatever good 
work interests them they do, as long as it inter- 
ests them. When it gets to be tiresome or un- 
pleasant they put it away like a child. They go 
where they like, and when they like, and as long 
as they like, and they take small counsel of that 
stout imperative “ must.” 

But God expects every Christian to do his duty. 
Nelson reminded his soldiers that England ex- 
pected that of every Englishman. Napoleon re- 


SERVING GOD FOR NAUGHT. 203 

minded his soldiers, at the battle of the Nile, that 
from yonder pyramids forty centuries looked 
down upon them. There are the two motives. 
Shall we work to give something — to give our al- 
legiance and our lives to the Power that is over 
us ? or shall we work to gain something — to get 
somebody's good opinion, or to get a gratification 
of our own pleasure? Shall our offering be a 
sacrifice or a bargain ? 

God desires us to do our duty. And one of the 
characteristics of duty is that it is a thing done 
out of the sense of obligation. It is our duty, for 
example, to obey the will of Christ. And that 
means that we are to do just what he tells us to 
do, whether we want to or not ; obeying not our 
own inclinations, but his positive commandments. 
Take, for instance, the matter of forgiveness, 
upon which he laid such frequent emphasis. 
When it is easy for us to forgive we are probably 
not obeying Christ nor doing our duty at all; 
we are obeying our own selves and doing our own 
pleasure. When it seems almost impossible to 
forgive and we forgive, then we are following the 
Master along the hard path of duty. 

Indeed, the test of duty is nearly always the 
presence of difficulty. When inclination says, 
“I don't want to do that," and conscience says, 
“You must," there is a case of duty. Let me 


204 


SERVING GOD FOR NAUGHT. 


illustrate this by two or three every-day applica- 
tions. 

I would say that it is the duty of all Christian 
people, who are in health and are not imperatively 
hindered, to present themselves before God in his 
house upon every Lord’s Day. This is one of the 
things which man owes to God. When you are 
tired with your week’s work, or the way is long, 
or the sky is overcast, or the rain falls, then the 
test comes. You can go to church, and you don’t 
want to go to church, but you ought to go to 
church. That is the syllogism of duty. Now you 
will discover whether your attendance is a matter 
of duty with you or not. When there are empty 
seats upon a rainy Sunday, one third of those who 
are absent are infirm in body, the other two thirds 
are only infirm in duty. 

I would say further that it is the duty of every 
Christian who has time to do some Christian 
work. This applies to every Christian, but 
especially to women, because they have the most 
time. The societies of a parish never enroll all 
the members of the parish j often the members 
are but a minority of the congregation. This is 
partly because some of the people have no time. 
They are mothers who must take care of their 
children, or who must do their household work ; 
in their case the call of duty is to stay at home. 


SERVING GOD FOR NAUGHT. 


205 


But there are also a great many other people in 
every parish who are never seen helping with the 
good work because they are deficient in a sense 
of duty. They are doing what they like, not 
what they ought. 

It is also a universal Christian duty to give not 
only time but money. And this applies chiefly 
to the men, because they have most money. But 
every offering in every congregation discovers a 
lack of the sense of duty. Whoever sees it and 
notices what kind of coins compose it, knows that 
the larger part of it was given simply at hap- 
hazard. The plate came by and the giver felt 
constrained to give something, and he put his 
hand in his pocket and gave the first small coin 
which his fingers lighted upon. That was no 
honest Christian giving. That did not count in 
God’s sight for anything. These men did not say 
to themselves : Here is this good cause, how much 
ought I to give ? They knew that, if they gave 
nothing, somebody would notice it. And so they 
gave, perhaps, a three-cent piece, which looks so 
like a dime ! Ask the treasurer of the church 
how often people come to him after the day of 
some special offering and say : “I could not be 
at church last Sunday; here is my part of the 
contribution.” That is a measure of the sense of 
duty. 


206 


SERVING GOD FOR NAUGHT. 


But there is a better word than duty, and that 
is devotion. 

“When ye shall have done all these things 
which are commanded you, say, We are unprofit- 
able servants j we have done that which was our 
duty to do.” What ! Unprofitable servants still, 
with all our duties done ? Yes ; for there is a de- 
fect in duty. Duty has plenty of conscience, but 
no heart. The essential characteristic of it, as I 
said, is obligation. But that is not the ideal kind 
of service. “ I will take the Lord for my God be- 
cause I want to, because I love him.” That is the 
ideal way of serving God. 

Love is better than obligation. Better than 
duty is devotion. For it is love which enriches 
and beautifies and inspires and consecrates devo- 
tion, and lifts it high above all the duty-doing 
in the world. Love drives no bargains. Love 
knows no measuring of give and take. It is 
love’s privilege to give. By and by Jacob came 
to love God j he came to realize his own imperfect 
service, and God’s great, infinite love and bound- 
less goodness ; he came to see that a balancing of 
divine blessing with human obedience would be 
the most disastrous thing which could happen to 
a sinful man. 

God is our loving Father. What devotion is 
too great for us to give him ? Christ from his 


SERVING GOD FOR NAUGHT. 


207 


cross cries, “This have I done for thee.” Who 
shall set a bound, or a measure, or an end to our 
willingness and eagerness to do whatever thing 
we can for him ? 

For all who love God the terms of that old bar- 
gain are written over again with a different mean- 
ing. Though God lead me along a narrow way, 
where it is hard to go, and give me of bread and 
raiment but a scanty measure, and tribulation 
with it, yet will I serve him 5 yet will I devote 
myself to him body and soul, and count no sacri- 
fice precious enough for him 5 yet will I love him 
with all the love of my whole heart, and the Lord 
shall be my God. 


TWO STUMBLING-STONES. 


There are two stumbling-stones which vex the 
feet of beginners in religion. I would there were 
no more than two ! The whole way, on both sides 
of the gate of entrance, is set about, and nar- 
rowed, and encumbered with difficulties. Es- 
pecially at the beginning. By and by, as the 
habits of the spiritual life are formed, and the 
soul gets used to facing temptation and climbing 
obstacles, and the light of heaven shines clearer 
and nearer along the path, the way grows easier. 
But it is hard at the beginning. There are ques- 
tions and problems, and hard lessons and per- 
suasions of the devil. It is with religion as it is 
with every other habit or knowledge : it is begun 
with the initiation of difficulty. Anybody who 
expects to begin religion at the end is going to be 
disappointed. Whoever waits to start out in the 
religious life with the wisdom of St. Paul and 
with the love of St. John will wait a long time. 
Children begin literature with a primer, not with 


TWO STUMBLING-STONES. 


209 


Plato ; and music, not with Beethoven, but with 
scales and exercises. And the primer is a great 
deal harder at the beginning than Plato is after 
awhile ; and the notes which take two fingers are 
longer in learning than the pages which take ten. 
The religious life — by which I mean the conscious 
and definite living of it, beginning with the public 
confession of Christian allegiance — the religious 
life begins amid the stumbling-stones. 

And of these there are two which lie so close 
to the beginning that they are even outside the 
gate, and the beginner in religion comes to them 
almost before he begins, and sometimes at sight 
of them turns back and never begins at all. “ I 
am not good enough” is inscribed upon one of 
these stumbling-stones. “ Other people are not 
good enough ” is placarded on the other. Com- 
monly the second of these comes first. The pos- 
sible disciple is kept back by the un-Christlikeness 
of Christians. 

There is no use denying that some people in the 
Church are not as good as they ought to be ; and 
the beginner in religion knows these people better 
than the parish priest does, because he sees them 
between Sundays and in their working-clothes. 
The beginner in religion sees a great deal. And 
very often the little things trouble him more 
than the big ones. Little falsehoods ; little, petty, 


210 


TWO STUMBLING-STONES. 


mean cheats and over-reachings and dishonesties ; 
little offenses against perfect reverence and per- 
fect purity j little infirmities of temper — these he 
discovers in the life of some church-member every 
day, and the sight turns him against religion. 
He mutters “ Hypocrisy ! ” under his breath, and 
has his opinion of the Christian Church. 

All this is emphasized when the outsider is 
himself personally wronged, defrauded, meanly 
treated, spoken against, by some insider. He 
looks out of his window, and one passes by se- 
renely on his way to church who on Friday stole 
a hundred dollars out of his pocket by some sort 
of smart theft. There he goes to say his Chris- 
tian prayers, and to put twenty-five cents out of 
that hundred dollars into the alms basin, and to 
partake of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. 
The looker-on sits down and stays at home. 

This, however, is inevitable. Again and again, 
good, earnest, zealous men have tried to found a 
Church to which nobody could belong but ab- 
solutely perfect saints. They never have suc- 
ceeded. The sinners have somehow evaded all 
the examinations and gained membership. The 
devil has sown tares among the wheat. Judas 
was a church-member when there were but twelve 
in the congregation, and the minister was the 
Lord Christ himself. 


TWO STUMBLING-STONES. 


211 


It is well that we should all he mindful of the 
grave responsibilities of Church membership. It 
is well that we should often consider what sort of 
lives we ought to live, who do actually, among 
our acquaintances who are outside the Church, 
represent to them the Christian religion. We are 
epistles, known and read by all men. We cannot 
help it. We are like cities set upon the summit 
of the hills — we cannot be hid. We shall be held 
accountable for every soul whom we have kept 
back out of the Church by our disobedience to our 
Master. The only dangerous enemy which the 
Christian religion has is the unworthy Christian. 
We ought to think often and seriously about 
these grave responsibilities. 

Nevertheless, it is true to-day, and will remain 
true till Christ’s kingdom comes, that the Church 
is composed of “ saints,” just as the congregations 
were at Rome and Corinth — “ called to be saints,” 
but not always answering. It must needs be 
that offenses come — that is inevitable 5 though 
woe to the man by whom the offense cometh. 

What shall we say, then, to him who declares 
that he would join the Church if all the members 
of the Church were saints ? 

We might say to him that he would very likely 
he as much out of place in such celestial company 
as the rest of us would. We might remind him 


212 


TWO STUMBLING-STONES. 


that the Church is not, and never has been, and 
never will be, a club for the spiritual aristocracy, 
into which nobody shall be admitted unless he be 
attired in all the purple and fine linen of the gar- 
ments of holiness. That is not what the Church 
is for at all. The Church is meant for the ragged 
people too. “ The Lord added daily to the Church 
such as were being saved.” Some of them were, 
no doubt, only at the very beginning of salvation. 
They had just started in their fight with the devil. 
Without a doubt he would down them a hundred 
times before they would get him under their feet 
finally. But the Lord did not wait for that. All 
who were “ being saved ” were let in. The Church 
is not a soldiers’ home for spiritual veterans who 
have been through all the religious wars and have 
now no battles more to fight. The Church is 
called the Church “ militant” because it is meant 
to be an army. 

The people in it are supposed to be set against 
the evil of the world, in their own hearts first. 
But the Church is not an u ever- victorious ” army. 
Somebody is always getting defeated. But 
everybody who is on our side, and is willing to 
help in our crusade against the devil, we will 
make a recruit of him. The Church is sometimes 
called our “ mother,” because she teaches and 
trains us. But we are dull and refractory pupils, 


TWO STUMBLING-STONES. 


213 


a good many of us. However, if anybody wants 
to learn, wants to be trained to resist temp- 
tation and to follow righteousness, wants to 
be instructed in the truths of God, he may 
come in. 

The Church is really not meant for the saints 
at all. 

There will be no Church in heaven such as we 
have here. St. John came back from his glimpse 
into that celestial country, and reported that he 
could discover no church spire through all the 
length and breadth of it. “I saw no temple 
there,” he said. There is no room in the Church 
for saints. We have nothing here which we can 
offer to such high company. Saints have no need 
of sermons ; saints have no need of sacraments. 
The Church is meant for sinners. If anybody is 
conscious of unworthiness, sadly aware that the 
ideal life is very different from his, knows how 
hard it is to resist evil, and how difficult it is to 
learn the real truth of God, and feels the need of 
help, the Church is the place for him. 

The best thing to say to the beginner in re- 
ligion who is met at the outset by the un-Christ- 
likeness of Christians is that which our Lord 
said to Peter, when Peter, who was beginning to 
follow after him, turned about and saw another 
disciple also following, and asked a question 


214 


TWO STUMBLING-STONES. 


about him. Our Lord said, “What is that to 
thee ? follow thou me.” 

If you are tempted to ask questions about other 
disciples, the Lord asks this question of you : 
What is that to thee ? This one is dishonest, that 
one is bitter-tongued, these are unworthy, those 
are un-Christlike. Well, take them for warnings, 
then. 

First of all, remember that God knows their 
hearts, and is acquainted with their temptations, 
and is aware of all the efforts which they make 
or do not make, and hears them at their prayers ; 
and you are quite on the outside. Perhaps you 
are right in your stern judgment. Perhaps you 
are as mistaken as other people are mistaken in 
the hard thoughts they have of you. And then 
remember that Christ is the real Church, and 
that he has set his face against all wrong-doing, 
and, chiefest of all, against wrong-doing which 
wears a Sunday face, and for a pretense makes 
long prayers — chiefest and sternest against that. 
He will take care of all the Pharisees. You need 
not trouble yourselves about them. “ Follow me,” 
he says. “ What is that to thee ? ” 

The thing to be decided is whether joining the 
Church is the best thing or not the best thing 
that you can do. Whether other people have 
proved to be good church-members or bad has 


TWO STUMBLING-STONES. 


215 


really nothing to do with it. If there is any 
question about joining an army, the question is 
not decided for any thoughtful man by assuring 
him that there are great rascals in the ranks. 
What is the army fighting for? What is the 
cause which they are contesting or defending ? If 
the cause is a righteous one and ought to win, 
why, the more bad soldiers there are in the camp, 
the more need there is of a good soldier, who will 
do some stout fighting j and though the new re- 
cruit should find himself, like the neophyte in 
Dore’s picture, in strange company, that will not 
deter him. 

Are there any bad Christians? Well, then, if 
you believe that the cause of Christ ought to win 
in this world, come in and be a good Christian. 
No good work can be done on any wide scale for 
the uplifting of men without co-operation, with- 
out hearty and whole-souled co-operation. We 
want the help of every good man and woman in 
the world. 

If there is a question about joining a class for 
some special study, the question is not decided for 
any earnest seeker after truth by showing him 
that several members of the class are lazy and 
are not learning anything. What is that to him ? 
Can he him self learn anything ? Is there an effi- 
cient teacher ? Is there a helpful lesson ? 


216 


TWO STUMBLING-STONES. 


But “ I am not good enough” That is the other 
stumbling-stone. Let the other people go j they 
may be bad or good. At least I know myself. I 
am not good enough to join the Church. No ; if 
the Church is a club of saints. But it is not. The 
Church is a great association of sinners. Are 
you not a sinner ? The chief difference between 
the sinners outside the Church and the sinners 
inside the Church is, that those who are inside 
confess, by their position, that they want to be 
helped out of their sin. The others do not say 
that. 

Here is a great crowd of people listening to the 
message of the apostles, and at the end of the 
sermon some stay and some go away. Those 
who stay stay that they may be baptized and ad- 
mitted into the Church. They are “ pricked at 
the heart ” j they are conscious of sin 5 they want 
forgiveness and help to do better. Do they stay 
because they consider themselves better than other 
people ? Do they ask entrance to the Church be- 
cause they feel that they are good enough? Is 
there any doubt about the matter ? Is it not as 
plain as the shining sun that the people who con- 
sidered themselves pretty good people walked 
serenely away that afternoon, and never thought 
twice about joining the Church ? They were not 
“pricked at the heart.” They heard no accu- 


TWO STUMBLING-STONES. 


217 


sations from their deaf-and-dumb consciences. 
They were not conscious of any particular need of 
spiritual help. They were “ good enough.” That 
is just why they did not join the Church, because 
they were “ good enough.” 

You will never find anybody who is “good 
enough ” joining the Church. It is the people 
who are bad enough who come into the haven of 
the Church. It is those who are weary and heavy 
laden with a burden of sin who seek rest in the 
Church. It is those who are sadly conscious that 
they are not approaching their ideal who come 
for help into the Church. 

If you mean, when you say that you are not 
“ good enough ” that you have no real desire and 
longing to live the life which our Lord wants us 
to live, that is another matter 5 then you are not 
good enough, indeed. But if you mean that you 
are not yet as strong a Christian as you wish 
to be ; if you mean that your love and devotion 
to Jesus Christ are not so deep and tender as 
you wish; if you mean that there are a hun- 
dred lessons in the Christian life in which you 
cannot pass a good examination — why, you are 
beginning at the end. The purpose of the Church 
is to help you in all this. If you had learned it 
all, there would be no need for you to join the 
Church. “Follow me,” Christ says. And what 


218 


TWO STUMBLING-STONES. 


yon are to do is just that, day by day, trying al- 
ways to get a little closer. But do not think that 
you may not enroll yourself among the followers 
of Christ until you have come up as close behind 
him as the apostle Paul. Everybody is a follower 
of Christ who is trying to follow Christ. 

To honestly and earnestly desire to live a 
Christian life is all that Christ asks at the begin- 
ning. 


WHY WE OUGHT TO LOVE GOD. 


We ought to love God. It is our duty to love 
God. We are commanded to love God. “Thou 
shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, 
and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and 
with all thy strength.” The Old Testament and 
the New Testament unite in emphasizing that in- 
junction. It is not likely, however, that that text 
ever persuaded anybody into loving God. Love 
laughs at injunctions, pays no heed to duty, ab- 
solutely cannot be commanded. Obedience can be 
got that way, but love — never ! 

It is of the very nature and essence of love that 
it must grow in a willing heart. Figs will grow 
on thistles quite as readily as love at the word 
of law. There is no such thing as love by regu- 
lation. Love is the manifestation of an untram- 
meled choice. If the choice be hindered, unwill- 
ingly directed, made under dictation, it is no 
choice, and the object chosen is not loved. 

It may be that God set temptation within the 


220 


WHY WE OUGHT TO LOVE GOD. 


reach of man that he might thus make it possible 
for us really to love him. The test of love is pref- 
erence. Love comes out into the light, and is 
discovered when there is a choice to be made be- 
tween two, or for or against. Man, hedged about 
with imperative innocence, without a chance to 
choose between God and the devil, compelled to 
obey God, having no way of showing any volun- 
tary loyalty to God, woxdd never have loved God. 
God set that forbidden tree in the midst of Eden 
that man might use his gift of will, and might 
thus be able to render God a willing service, that 
is, a loving service. He took away bondage and 
compulsion when he planted that old tree in 
Eden. That was a liberty tree. That was the 
one fact in the world which kept man from being 
a machine. With that great tree shading his 
path, man was a man, having the power of choice, 
a responsible being, the possessor of a free will, 
and so, able to love God. Every temptation, 
every opportunity to do wrong from Eden down, 
has given man a chance to vindicate his man- 
hood, to choose as a man may, and to show God 
that he loves him. The best way in the whole 
world for a man to show his love for God is to 
say “no” to the devil, and to stand up on the 
side of God. 

But we must not do that because we are com- 


WHY WE OUGHT TO LOVE GOD. 221 

manded to do it, because we are afraid not to 
do it, but because we want to do it, if there is 
to be any real love in it. Love must be the free 
choice of a willing heart. Love cannot be com- 
manded. 

The purpose of the great commandment is not 
to establish obedience, but to proclaim an ideal. 
The spirit of it is not that we must love God 
because we must, but that God wants us to love 
him. The two supreme commandments of the 
gospel show us the sort of man that God approves 
of. They hold up an ideal. They reveal the di- 
vine standard of human manhood. The manliest 
man to be found anywhere in this great family of 
God is he who loves God with all his heart and 
soul and mind and strength ; and who loves his 
neighbor as himself. 

But if we desire to love God better than we do, 
we will have to find some other text than that to 
help us. Take this one: “We love him because 
he first loved us.” 

God loves us. Before Christ came, bringing 
that message from the divine Father, and writing 
it in the sight of all the world over the arms of 
that Good Friday cross on Calvary hill, people 
deemed it too good to be true. In days of pros- 
perity, in the sunshine, in the strength of health, 
and in the time of content, it was thought that 


222 


WHY WE OUGHT TO LOVE GOD. 


perhaps it might be true. Up above there some- 
where, among the everlasting stars, there might 
perhaps be a beneficent Creator, a kindly Ruler, 
possibly a loving Father. But when the sun went 
down, and darkness came upon the earth, and 
adversity and accident lay in wait along the path, 
when pain came and death after it, and all things 
seemed to be going wrong, almost everybody lost 
sight of that beautiful dream. It was not true. 
God did not care. God is not love. The psalm- 
ists and the prophets, who had better eyes than 
other people to see God, somehow kept their faith. 
But others lost heart — feared God, but did not 
love him. 

The truth is, there is no revelation of the love 
of God in all the pages of the book of nature ; I 
mean of that side of God’s love which touches us 
as individuals. History teaches plainly enough, 
most people think, that God cares for the race. 
God has all these centuries been teaching and bet- 
tering the race. He has seemed sometimes to be 
a stern schoolmaster 5 he has punished those who 
would not learn his lessons, with inevitable and 
unsparing severity, listening to no excuses, never 
pardoning human ignorance — that is, so far as 
this world goes j and that is as far as man can 
see. But it has all been for the best. That is 
plain enough. We can look back now and see 


WHY WE OUGHT TO LOVE GOD. 223 

that. All the plagues and the famines, all the 
wars and the martyrdoms — we can see their 
place in the general bettering of human life. 
The world has all along been growing better. 
This year is the best year that man ever lived in 
since the year one. God cares for the race. He 
is a careful Father, possibly a loving one, at least 
that far. 

That might be an argument for the reality of 
God’s love for you and me. We belong to the 
race. Our good and evil fortune is inextricably 
intermingled with the fortunes of the race. 
Whatever is good for the world at large, — or per- 
haps I would better say, whatever has been good 
for the world at large in the past, — helps us. Our 
brethren, all along, have died that we may live. 
Over and over, men have gone to death as the 
Russian soldiers marched into that tragic ditch of 
Schweidnitz, that those who came behind might 
pass on over them and win the victory. But how 
about those poor fellows down there in the ditch ? 
Did God love them when he gave them death in 
the place of triumph ? You and I get into the 
black shadow of pain, and we look up, and the 
face of God is hidden from our eyes. It may be 
that our pain may somehow help our brother, but 
does not God care more, then, for our brother than 
he does for us? God is love, St. John tells us. 


224 WHY WE OUGHT TO LOVE GOD. 

We love him, St. John says, because he first loved 
ns. But does God love us? Has not God de- 
serted us, lost sight of us, forgotten us, remem- 
bering only the great race of man? And we 
realize the infinity of God ; and we remind our- 
selves that this whole planet is but a grain of 
dust in the vast, illimitable universe of God. 
What is man, what is any one individual, that 
God should be mindful of him? Is not God 
mindful only of the race ? The great God, out 
among the everlasting stars, must not a vast num- 
ber of us small creatures be set together before 
we can be of size enough for him to see ? 

Of course we have a ready and effectual answer 
to that last fear of the human heart. God is a 
spirit, and size of body matters not with him. 
No amount of material substance can compare in 
value to a thinking brain. No weight of rock can 
enter into competition with a soul. The great 
sun, and all the suns melted together into one 
vast white-hot furnace of interminable flame are 
not worth a soul. Wherever God finds a man he 
finds a being akin to his own self, something in- 
deed divine. Every man is of value, must in the 
very nature of things be of value, in the eyes of 
God. 

But when we ask if God really loves us, then 
the book of nature has no satisfying answer, and 


WHY WE OUGHT TO LOVE GOD. 225 

the pages of human philosophy have no satisfy- 
ing answer. “ God is love ” is not written so that 
we can be sure of it in any book but one. “ We 
have known and believed the love that God hath 
to us ; ” that was not spelled out with the alpha- 
bet of common experience j a Christian said that, 
a Christian apostle who had learned from One 
who was different from all other men, a disciple 
of the supreme spiritual Master whom the Father 
himself instructed. 

Christ is the only authoritative teacher of the 
love of God. We know and believe the love that 
God hath to us, because Christ has taught us. 

Christ taught God’s love for man in the blessed 
words that he spoke. 

The Christian name for God is Father. God 
is our Father. That is the one word in which is 
summed up all that Jesus taught of God. See 
how it stands in the Christian religion at the very 
beginning of the Christian Creed, “ I believe in 
God the Father ”5 and at the very opening of 
the lips at the beginning of the Christian prayer, 
“Our Father.” Jesus himself said that name so 
lovingly, with such a singular and memorable 
tenderness in his tone, that they who heard him 
speak it never forgot the sound of his blessed 
voice in the syllables of the Syrian word. And 
they set it down in the pages of the gospels un- 


226 WHY WE OUGHT TO LOVE GOD. 

translated, just as he pronounced it, to come 
down to us a testimony of that close and confi- 
dent and filial relation which Jesus held with the 
Eternal. 11 Abba” was the word for “ father ” in 
the language of that country. It was the name 
which the little Galilean children learned in their 
cradles. Abba — father. Jesus looked up to the 
great God and called him, and taught us to call 
him, by that loving name. 

God is our Father. All that is true of the ten- 
derest and wisest fatherhood is true of God. And 
nothing is true of him, though it be written in 
all the theologies, which contradicts that name. 
God is our own Father. “ Behold what manner 
of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that 
we should be called the sons of God.” That means 
God’s individual knowledge of us. It means God’s 
individual care for each one of us. Christ said — 
whatever our questioning hearts may say — Christ 
said for all who are able to believe him, able to 
trust him, that God does care. Christ answered 
the universal question. The heavenly Father 
loves the smallest and obscurest of all his chil- 
dren. Not one out of the whole great number, 
not even the prodigal, is forgotten of God. 

And Christ taught God’s love in other ways 
than in the lesson of his words. He taught it by 
the lesson of his life. 


WHY WE OUGHT TO LOVE GOD. 227 

For the life of Jesus, even more than the 
words of Jesus, was a revelation of God. We do 
not need, I think, to go very deep into the pro- 
fundities of theology to see that. God must he 
better than any man ; that is plain enough. And 
the better a man is the truer is the revelation 
which he bears of God, the higher the idea of God 
which he makes possible in the hearts of men 
about him. And when you find an ideal man, a 
man who sets a standard of manhood such as no 
saint or hero in all history has ever touched, even 
so much as touched, before his day or since — 
when you find such a man, such a divine man, is 
he not a revelation, and the truest of all revela- 
tions, of the Most High God ? The highest truth 
that has ever been reached, or discovered, or 
dreamed of about God is that God is like Christ. 
And that truth must be true. Henceforward, it 
becomes impossible for one who honestly and in- 
telligently thinks about it to believe anything 
less than that. God is like Christ. And every 
child knows how Christ was the supreme incarna- 
tion of love. To love men as Christ loved them 
has ever since been the unrealized dream of every 
Christian benefactor. How patient he was with 
the ignorant, how generous in making all allow- 
ance for the sinner, how full of sympathy with 
all sorrow, how he went about doing good and 


228 


WHY WE OUGHT TO LOVE GOD. 


trying in all manner of ways to get more love 
into this unhrotherly world — all this is written 
in the plain pages of the Christian gospel. Christ 
gave us a better rule for loving our brothers 
than that second commandment. He said that we 
should love others as he loved us. That touches 
the supremest possibility of human affection. 

The Father does seem sometimes a long way 
off, and very great, and incorporeal, and invisi- 
ble, and almost impersonal ; and so, perhaps, hard 
to love. But it is not hard to love Christ. How 
can anybody help loving Christ ? And whoever 
loves Christ loves God. Whoever has seen Christ 
and known Christ has seen and known the Father. 
Christ is the very closest we can possibly get to 
God. 

Finally, Christ taught the love of God for us 
not only in the life he lived, but in the death that 
he died. 

God is our Father, and our Father loves us j 
and God is like Christ, and so God loves us. But 
that old question comes back sometimes in spite 
of that, — that old question about the possibility 
of any union between love and pain. Pain comes, 
and we begin to doubt. Then the cross teaches 
its wonderful lesson of strength and comfort. 
For here is Christ, whom the Father loves su- 
premely, set in the midst of sorrow. His friends 


WHY WE OUGHT TO LOVE GOD. 229 

have forsaken him; his enemies, who hate him 
without a cause, crowd in about him ; he has ex- 
perience of suffering, the shadow of death falls 
about him ; and the sky is black above him. If 
pain means that God forgets, then God has for- 
gotten. Yet out of all these depths of anguish, 
out of all this blackness of desolation, he who 
knows God best of all who ever breathed looks 
up into his Father’s face, and calls him Father. 

We wonder if pain and love can really go to- 
gether, and behold ! here they are together at the 
cross of Jesus. He whom God loves suffers ; love 
unspeakable, suffering unspeakable. Henceforth 
let no sorrowing soul fear that God has forgot- 
ten. The Father never forgets. The Father loves 
eternally. 

He wants us never to forget him. He who 
loves us asks our love, because he loves us. We 
love him because he first loved us. 


THE SICK OF THE PALSY. 


In a large upper room, such as they have in the 
houses of the East, the Master is teaching, and 
outside the house and street are thronged with 
listeners. Suddenly there is a noise of hurrying 
feet, and down the road come five men, one lying 
on a bed and four carrying him, all with their 
eyes turned toward this house. They want to 
get where Christ is. But the street is crowded. 
There is no way of getting near even to the door. 
What shall they do ? Why, here is the outside 
stairway, leading to the roof. Up this hurry the 
four, bearing their precious burden. The listen- 
ers in the upper room hear the sound of the 
trampling feet. Then there is a noise of pound- 
ing and pulling and beating j dust and chips be- 
gin to fall upon the heads of the crowded congre- 
gation. And presently there is a great hole in 
the ceiling, and down comes the sick man through 
the hole, lying in his bed, the four letting him 
down, one at each corner, until he lies at the feet 
of Christ. 


THE SICK OF THE PALSY. 


231 


The coming of these men in search of Christ 
showed a good deal of faith. But that they should 
have climbed upon the roof and made a hole in 
the ceiling, and let the sick man through — this 
showed that these five men were very much in 
earnest, and that their faith was genuine. 

Because the crowd was a test. How strong, 
now, is the desire of these five to come into 
Christ’s presence ? The hindrance will show that. 
Half-heartedness would have taken the crowd 
for a good excuse, and would have turned back. 
But genuine earnestness looks about, as these men 
did, for some way to climb over hindrances, and 
to turn stumbling-blocks into stepping-stones. 
All hindrances are tests. They try the reality of 
our resolutions and the genuineness of our pur- 
poses. A black sky of a Sunday morning tests 
the strength of a Christian. Those who are physi- 
cally or morally weak stay at home. This is but 
a homely illustration of one of the constant truths 
of human life. God is every day testing us, and 
in every way. He himself knows us ; he has no 
need for him self to test us. But we do not any of 
us know ourselves perfectly well. And the tests 
which come with hindrances bring us revelations 
of ourselves. 

We all imagine that we are patient and forgiv- 
ing and honest and faithful until we are tested. 


232 


THE SICK OF THE PALSY. 


After that, imagination is translated into knowl- 
edge. That is one of the blessings which God 
sends with every difficulty and grief and trial. 
Every day we are tested. And the tests dispel 
delusions. We come to see ourselves as we are. 
We discover where we are weak. And thus we 
find out where we need to fortify ourselves and 
to get strong. 

The test of hindrance came in the way of these 
men, and at once they showed how strong was 
their desire to get into Christ’s presence. At first 
it seemed impossible for them to get where Christ 
was. But it was not impossible, there was a way. 
And that way they found. 

It is always possible to get near to Christ. 
There is no kind of hindrance which so stands 
between Christ and the soul that the soul cannot 
break through and touch Christ. Down through 
the broken ceiling comes the sick man into the 
presence of Christ. 

And then that happened which came to pass a 
thousand times during the life of Christ: he 
looked down at the sick man at his feet, who lay 
there wondering, no doubt, and anxious as to 
what the Master might have to say to such an in- 
terruption in his sermon. He looked down, and 
the light came into his face, and he gave his wel- 
come. “ Son, be of good cheer,” he said. 


THE SICK OF THE PALSY. 


233 


For while it is blessedly true that an approach 
to Christ is possible in spite of every hindrance to 
every soul that earnestly seeks him, it is also true 
that Christ has a welcome for every soul. Who- 
ever comes to him he will in no wise cast out. 
Because Christ changes not. What he was in Gali- 
lee he is still, unchangeably. Whoever brings a 
grief to him to-day Christ sees and hears as he 
did in that upper room in Peter’s house, and 
answers and blesses still. 

Presently he spoke again to the paralytic, and 
said, “ Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine 
house.” His prayer was answered. 

That is the story of the miracle with a good 
deal left out, with the most important part left 
out. Thus far it is like many another miracle, 
except that the man who was healed was some- 
what more persistent than usual. But Christ did 
much more for the paralytic than to cure his sick- 
ness : he forgave his sins. 

Indeed, the absolution came before the miracle. 
And the miracle followed as a quite subordinate 
matter, — as a piece of evidence. Christ worked 
the miracle as a proof of the absolution. u That 
ye may know that the Son of man hath power on 
earth to forgive sins (then saith he to the sick of 
the palsy), Arise.” 

That must have surprised the paralytic. He 


234 


THE SICK OF THE PALSY. 


had gone to Christ as men go to a physician. He 
was afflicted with the palsy and he wanted to 
get relief from it. He had heard that Christ had 
been effecting some remarkable cures. He believed 
tha1> Christ could cure him. So far as we know, 
this man had come to Peter’s house with no more 
thought of religion than we have when we con- 
sult a doctor. And the first words which proceed 
from the Physician’s bps are these remarkable 
ones : “ Son, be of good cheer ; thy sins be for- 
given thee.” 

The blessings of God do not always come as 
we ask or think. Sometimes people imagine that 
prayer is not answered, because it is not answered 
in their way. Sometimes people come to think 
that there are no rewards in the service of God, 
because God does not reward them with the 
blessings which they expect or desire. They 
meet hindrances and overcome them ; and then 
they enter with their petitions into Christ’s pres- 
ence ; and Christ surprises them as he surprised 
the paralytic. He gives them a blessing which 
they have not asked for. 

I read here in Christ’s absolution of the para- 
lytic a lesson about the rewards of God. The best 
rewards of God are spiritual. The greatest thing 
which Christ could do for this paralytic was to 
forgive his sins. If he had sent him away then, 


THE SICK OF THE PALSY. 


235 


still on his bed and borne by four, and left bim 
to be afflicted by palsy to the end of his days, he 
would still have bestowed upon him the richest of 
all blessings, and he would have denied him only 
a lower and inferior reward, which, beside the 
other, was simply nothing. The soul is better 
than the body. Holiness is better than health. 
Character cannot be balanced by any equivalent 
of worldly prosperity. 

The trouble is that some people forget that. 
They serve God, and they think that they ought 
to be rewarded with money. They do their Chris- 
tian duty, and they think that they ought to be 
free from doctors’ bills. But that is not God’s 
way. It is not promised to the pure in heart that 
they shall live in brown-stone houses, but that 
they shall see God. That is their reward. That 
is the best of all possible rewards — to be forgiven, 
to grow in grace, to have the approbation of 
God. What is there in this world to be desired 
better than that ? 

It was but a small thing in the estimation of 
Christ that this man’s body should be afflicted 
with palsy. But that his soul should be afflicted 
with sin — that was a serious matter. The Gospels 
leave unsaid a great many things which we should 
like to know. How came it that this man, who 
from first to last uttered not a word, had his sins 


236 


THE SICK OP THE PALSY. 


forgiven 1 What had he done to make Christ say 
that ? There is not hin g here to indicate that the 
man had any feeling of repentance, nor even of 
religion. That we have to put in ourselves. We 
know, at least, that the man had faith enough to 
bring him to the feet of Christ. And we know 
that Christ forgave his sins. 

Whether the paralytic was surprised or not we 
do not know. There is no record of it. But the 
scribes were surprised. The scribes sat in that 
upper room where they had been listening to the 
Prophet of Galilee, and when they heard him 
say, “ Thy sins be forgiven thee,” they were both 
surprised and shocked. “ Behold, certain of the 
scribes said within themselves, This man blas- 
phemeth.” Who can forgive sins, they thought 
within their hearts, but God only? Christ met 
this question with a plain assertion. “ The Son of 
man,” he said, “ hath power on earth to forgive 
sins.” This assertion he further emphasized by 
healing the paralytic’s body. And then he left 
them to draw what inferences they might. 

God does not force his truth upon the minds of 
men. He might have written it across the sky ; 
he might have taken away the clouds of the sun- 
set and hung illuminated texts in place of them $ 
he might have had the thunder chant the Nicene 
Creed. Not so has God dealt with us. There is 


THE SICK OF THE PALSY. 


237 


no truth in all the teachings of theology which 
God has made so plain but that a man may miss 
it. There is no doctrine that can be set beside 
the proposition that two and two make four, and 
we can say, Here are two axioms ; one is as evi- 
dent as the other. There is no problem in divin- 
ity which can be proved as a problem in arithme- 
tic can. This is partly on account of the nature 
of theological truth; it is beyond the limits of 
measurement by foot-rule. It is like human love : 
it cannot be weighed in balances, nor tested by 
chemicals. This is partly, also, on account of the 
nature of the human mind. God, who has given 
us minds, means us to use them. God sets cer- 
tain facts before us, as was done here in this room 
in Peter’s house where the scribes were, and then 
he leaves us to make out what the facts mean. 

“ The Son of man hath power on earth to for- 
give sins.” 

There are two great truths which Christ came 
especially to emphasize among us : that we need 
forgiveness and that we may be forgiven. 

The value of the second of these truths rests, 
of course, upon the first. For unless we need 
forgiveness, it matters little whether forgiveness 
is possible or not. I am afraid that the need of 
forgiveness is not always felt as we ought to feel 
it. Somehow in these days we are inclined to 


238 THE SICK OF THE PALSY. 

emphasize what we may, perhaps, call the good- 
nature of God. We ourselves look, for the most 
part, leniently upon sin. The consciousness of 
our own weakness impels us to make allowances. 
Sin is a great misfortune. Sin always means loss 
to the sinner. God is our loving and compassion- 
ate Father. Surely he will not be very hard upon 
his erring children. That is a common way of 
regarding sin to-day. And it takes rather for 
granted that forgiveness is so easy that God, 
looking upon sin and knowing the strength of 
temptation, forgives men without their asking. 
This attitude toward sin, this unformulated theory 
of forgiveness, is due to the excessive preaching 
of the wrath of God which prevailed a genera- 
tion or two ago. This is being followed by 
a season of reaction. There are no “brimstone 
comers ” in these days. Sermons are preached no 
longer upon “ sinners in the hands of an angry 
God ” so that the mouth of hell seems open beside 
men’s feet. And that is well. 

Nevertheless, there is a truth which is taught 
as plainly in the Holy Scriptures as the truth of 
God’s love, and that is the truth of God’s wrath. 
We think of Christ so often as the teacher of the 
love of God that we forget sometimes that he said 
anything about the wrath of God. But he did. 
There are not anywhere in the two Testaments 


THE SICK OF THE PALSY. 239 

plainer and truer words about the attitude of God 
toward human sin, and about the certain and 
fearful punishment which will inevitably overtake 
the impenitent, than proceeded from the lips of 
Christ. 

Sometimes some sin shows a little more clearly 
than usual how hard the heart of man can be $ 
sometimes, perhaps, one dear to us is touched by 
it, and we are filled with strong indignation. We 
feel for a moment that unless there is such a fact 
as hell somewhere in the plan of God something 
is very wrong about it ; and we begin to under- 
stand then just how God feels toward all sin, to- 
ward the sin which he sees, and perhaps no one 
else sees, within your heart and mine. Why, so 
fearful is the sinfulness of sin, and so unspeakably 
urgent is the need that somehow we be forgiven 
for it, that the cross was set up and Christ died 
upon it. Christ died because the destiny of the 
soul depends upon whether it can get forgiveness 
for its sin. God does love us infinitely. But God 
hates sin infinitely. We are all touched by sin. 
We all need God’s forgiveness. 

And when Christ said, “ The Son of man hath 
power on earth to forgive sins,” he taught that 
the forgiveness of sin is possible. In one sense 
it is not possible. There is no forgiveness which 
can make the sinner exactly as he would have 


240 


THE SICK OF THE PALSY. 


been if he had not done the sin, because sin de- 
grades the soul. Every sin carries the soul far- 
ther from God. Every sin makes it just so much 
harder for the soul to appreciate spiritual things, 
to enter into the joy of God. Forgiveness does 
not mean that the sinner is made, in relation to 
his own soul, as if he had never sinned. He must 
still pay one penalty for sin, the penalty of the 
spiritual loss which every sin entails. Though 
even this may be turned into blessing. The man 
by struggle against sin may gain a strength which, 
without that struggle, he could never have. Even 
sin may be transmuted into blessing. But this 
is what forgiveness means: it means that the 
sinner is made, in relation to God, as if he had 
never sinned. It means that the barrier which 
sin sets up between the soul of man and the love 
of God is thrown down. Forgiveness means that 
our sin is so put away that God, who hates sin, 
nevertheless loves us. This Christ has made pos- 
sible. We may be forgiven. 

u Thy sins be forgiven thee,” he said more than 
once to penitent sinners while he lived among us. 
11 This is my blood which is shed for you and for 
many, for the remission of sins,” he said the night 
before the cross. Go teach men that their sins 
may be forgiven, preach the remission of sins, he 
said to his apostles, when, after his resurrection, 


THE SICK OF THE PALSY. 


241 


he sent them out to teach his truth to men. That 
by the sacrifice of Christ’s death we have forgive- 
ness is the very central truth of the whole gospel. 
Explain it as we may, construct about it whatever 
doctrine or theory we please, here is the truth. 
“ God so loved the world, that he gave his only be- 
gotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him 
should not perish, but have everlasting life.” 
“ The blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us 
from all sin.” 


THE CONSOLATION OF RELIGION. 


The subject is the consolation of religion. A 
wise man wrote a book once about the consola- 
tions of philosophy. No doubt he discovered a 
great many philosophical consolations. One of 
the difficulties, however, about that sort of con- 
solation is that one must be a philosopher to ap- 
preciate it. Philosophy is for the wise. 

The old philosophers, the Epicureans and the 
Stoics, whom St. Paul met at Athens, taught an 
immense deal of truth ; and the truth they taught 
was exceedingly helpful and uplifting. Put the 
best teachings of those two philosophers together 
and you get a very fair imitation of Christianity. 
But the Epicureans and the Stoics never got much 
influence over the people. They lived in the 
most irreligious and immoral era of all history, 
and included nearly all the good men of their day, 
and they were always trying, as we say, to “ reach 
the masses.” But they never succeeded. With 
all their truth and all their goodness, the world 


THE CONSOLATION OF RELIGION. 243 

around them still went on believing lies and fol- 
lowing the devil, absolutely uninfluenced. 

These philosophies were of necessity reserved 
for the educated and the cultured. They were 
like the substitutes which some excellent people 
propose to-day to take the place of religion — ele- 
vated, ethical, altruistic, spiritual, but essentially 
philosophical ; and therefore unpersuasive and, in- 
deed, incomprehensible, except to people of a phil- 
osophical turn of mind; having no understand- 
able message to the common people, who, after 
all, make up a considerable majority of the in- 
habitants of this planet. These schemes — positiv- 
ism, secularism, ethical culture, and that sort of 
thing — are most excellent, and indeed Christian, 
so far as they go, but the immense difference be- 
tween Christianity and any sort of philosophy is 
that Christianity has something to say, and is able 
to say it to every man, woman, and child, learned 
or unlearned, the world over. It is not only the 
philosophers that need consolation. The “con- 
solations of philosophy v are not enough. 

Philosophy, indeed, is able to console the phi- 
losophers only when they stand in no great need 
of consolation. Philosophy is an excellent relig- 
ion for cultured people — in fair weather. 

When the skies shine and business is prosper- 
ous, and there is money in the bank, and home is 


244 THE CONSOLATION OP RELIGION. 

pleasant and books are friendly, and nobody is 
sick, and no sense of sin darkens the past or the 
future — why, then, if one is philosophically in- 
clined, and “ up ” to that sort of interesting specu- 
lation, philosophy may, perhaps, give all the con- 
solation that is needed. Philosophy, that is, is an 
admirable consolation when there is no sorrow. 

But let the skies be overcast $ let trouble follow 
trouble in funereal procession along the way of 
life j let discouragement, and doubt, and discord, 
and doctor bills, and death come in to take away 
all delight and desire of living ; let the sense of 
sin and the necessity of salvation get hold upon 
the conscience, and where are the consolations of 
philosophy? What can the philosopher say be- 
side the sick-bed and the death-bed? The only 
thing I know that he can say out of his honest 
heart is that cry which Pliny uttered in the midst 
of his bitter bereavement — Pliny himself a philos- 
opher of the philosophers — u Oh, for some strong 
and abiding consolation ! ” In the presence of the 
real sorrows of life, in the face of death, in the 
sight of sin, philosophy is simply dumb. There 
is no strong and abiding consolation in philoso- 
phy even for philosophers. 

Philosophy is all down here on the earth. 
There is no voice in it speaking out of the sky. 
It has nothing to say to us about God, or about 


THE CONSOLATION OF RELIGION. 245 

the life beyond the grave. Its teaching is entirely 
ethical ; its concern is with daily conduct. That 
sort of teaching is immensely important, and that 
concern ought to be the chief concern — and was 
in Christ’s day — of the Christian religion. But 
you have got to have something more than that 
in a life which has death at the end of it and the 
mystery of pain all through it. 

Somebody said to me the other day that he 
could very readily accept the ethics of Christian- 
ity, and if there were nothing but ethics in it he 
would very gladly become a member of the Chris- 
tian Church. But a simply ethical Christianity 
would have no answer to the profoundest ques- 
tions of human life, except “I know not.” It 
would have to stand here among the ills and 
pains and sins and funerals with dumb lips. It 
would be like philosophy, offering no consolation. 
It is the peculiar blessing of religion that it is 
able to wipe away men’s tears. 

“ Comfort ye, comfort ye my people ” is the er- 
rand on which the ministers of the Christian 
Church are sent. “ Come unto me all ye that are 
weary and heavy laden ” is the gracious invitation 
which they bring. “And I saw the holy city, new 
Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, 
prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 
And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, 


246 THE CONSOLATION OF RELIGION. 

Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he 
will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, 
and God himself . . . shall wipe away all tears 
from their eyes and there shall be no more death, 
neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be 
any more pain : for the former things are passed 
away” 

It is worth while to read that amid the prophe- 
cies of the millennium, which are just now so plen- 
tiful. It is somewhat different from most of them. 
What St. John saw was not what Edward Bel- 
lamy nor William Morris saw. But it is the Chris- 
tian vision of the twentieth century. It is a look 
into a land of universal consolation. 

Consider the Christian revelation of divine love. 

The Christian religion teaches us that God is 
our Father, and that he loves us more than the 
tenderest of human fathers loves his children. 
The central symbol of Christianity is the cross of 
Calvary. And one of the blessed revelations of 
that cross is the truth that human pain and divine 
love can go together. God loved Christ unspeak- 
ably. Christ was the “only begotten Son of 
God,” whose giving to take away our sins was the 
supreme assurance of God’s love for us. And yet 
Christ suffered. All through life he went poor, 
of humble station, accustomed to hardship, having 
no place to lay his head, unpopular, subject to in- 


THE CONSOLATION OF RELIGION. 247 

suit, acquainted with weariness, having intimate 
knowledge of disappointment and ingratitude and 
injustice, finally enduring the shame and agony 
of crucifixion. 

God loved him, and yet all this was in life. 
And when we see that and have such ills in our 
lives, we know that the pain is not a contradiction 
of the fatherhood of God. God’s own Son suffered 
as we do, and worse. It is not likely that we will 
ever understand with our human understanding 
the mystery of pain. It will always remain, like 
the mystery of life, one of the unanswerable prob- 
lems. Why, in this case and in that, in your case 
and in mine, things happen as they do, nobody 
can adequately say. 

But this, at least, we want to know about it — is 
there an angry tyrant or a loving Father over us ? 
And philosophy cannot tell us. When prosperity 
attends us it looks as if God loves us ; when ad- 
versity befalls us it looks as if God hates us. 
Which is the truth ? That is the question which 
the Christian religion unhesitatingly answers. 

The Father himself loveth you. The very hairs 
of your head are all numbered. In the world ye 
shall have tribulation • the disciple shall be as his 
Master ; and yet, peace I leave with you, let not 
your heart be troubled. Come unto me and learn 
of me, he said who came from God to tell us what 


248 


THE CONSOLATION OF RELIGION. 


God is. “ God is love,” said he whom the Master 
taught. “ Who shall separate us from the love 
of Christ ? ” asks another disciple j u shall tribula- 
tion, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or 
nakedness, or peril, or sword 1 ” And he answers 
his own question : “ Nay, in all these things we 
are more than conquerors through him that loved 
us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor 
life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor 
things present, nor things to come, nor height, 
nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to 
separate us from the love of God, which is in 
Christ Jesus our Lord.” The disciple who said 
that knew the consolation of religion. 

Consider also the Christian revelation of the 
life to come. 

Everybody knows what a consolation there is 
in hope. We are saved by hope, St. Paul says. 
All the doctors know how true that is. And all 
the rest of us know, too, how hope brings strength, 
makes endurance possible, and, taking tired travel- 
ers by the hand, leads them to the end of their 
journey. The task does not seem so hard if there 
is a reward worth working for at the end of it. 
The pain is not quite so bitter under the surgeon’s 
knife if health seems likely to come after it. No 
ill condition is quite unbearable if it is tempered 
with hope. Hope is a universal consolation. 


THE CONSOLATION OF RELIGION. 249 

Human life is so lamentably out of balance, full 
of injustice, people so seldom get their full deserts 
of good or ill, the world is such a disordered 
tangle, that another world seems a logical neces- 
sity. Or else God puts us to intellectual and 
spiritual confusion. A life to come is the best 
explanation we can think of for a thousand 
strange conditions. The truth of the very central 
assertion of all religion, the truth of the existence 
of God, seems to demand, if we may so say, for 
the justification of God himself that there be a 
world beyond the grave. 

Otherwise God is not love, cares not whether 
we serve him or curse him, distributes benedic- 
tions and maledictions without regard to charac- 
ter, suffers the saint to go miserable and the sin- 
ner to go happy into a common grave, sets Caesar 
on a throne and Christ on a cross, and answers 
the defiance of one and the love and faith of the 
other with the same answer — the answer of im- 
partial and unending death. 

Even philosophy has guessed at hope. But we 
know. “In my Father’s house are many man- 
sions j if it were not so I would have told you. I 
go to prepare a place for you.” There shall sin 
meet its merited punishment, and love be rewarded 
with love, and all the tangles be straightened out 
at last, all wrongs made right, ideal justice done 


250 THE CONSOLATION OF RELIGION. 

in the kingdom of heaven, in the city of God. 
Look with hope into the blessed future, O soul 
oppressed with the world’s injustice, smitten with 
disappointment, misunderstood, borne down with 
pain of body, laden with care, stricken with the 
separation of bereavement. Only wait, and there 
shall be an end and a beginning. Trust God and 
he will bring it to pass. 

The dead are not dead. Death is but the lifting 
of the veil which hangs between us and the larger 
life. By and by there is a meeting again, and no 
separation after that forever. For those who have 
served God there will be no crying in that other 
country. Only keep heart and work on in the 
midst of tribulation. “ I will come again and re- 
ceive you unto myself,” he said in whom we put 
our hope. And that will be the beginning of life 
and joy eternal. 

If the consolation of the love of God and the 
consolation of the hope of a life to come are ever 
imperatively needed both together, it is in the 
case of one who has his eyes open to the fact of 
sin. A quick, impulsive, unexpected passion 
sweeps away the reason of a man, and down he 
falls into some black, shameful sin. He has en- 
countered disgrace. At the least, he has come 
into that pitiable state in which he is despised by 
his own conscience. He has often said, following 


THE CONSOLATION OF RELIGION. 251 

the service book, that he was a miserable sinner. 
Now he knows it. And what has a miserable sin- 
ner to do with a righteous God ? What part or 
lot has he in any future happiness of the saints ? 
The man is lost. 

That is something quite different from losing 
money. This man has lost his soul. Where now 
shall he look for consolation ? Never man needed 
it more. Will philosophy console him? You 
know what sort of consolation philosophy gives 
in such a case. Philosophy says, You are a fool. 
You have sown and you shall reap. There is no 
love, no hope, no reconciliation with God, no offer 
of forgiveness, in any of the ethical philosophies. 
They are all intended for well-behaved people. 

That, however, is an extreme case. The major- 
ity of people do not he — a great deal, nor steal — 
a great deal, nor drink — a great deal, nor offend 
God in any way. They do not get away down 
into the depths. But it happens sometimes in the 
life of everybody who learns the real meaning of 
religion that there dawns upon the soul a great, 
strong consciousness of sin. The ideal life is set 
before a man ; thus and thus must he live whom 
God loves ; and the man looks at himself. And 
he sees sin. He sees that by temperament, by 
natural disposition — that is, by nature — he is un- 
devout, unprayerful, careless of spiritual things, 


252 


THE CONSOLATION OF RELIGION. 


selfish, far removed, very far removed, from the 
kind of life that God loves. And he reads how 
without holiness no man shall see the Lord, and 
he realizes that in him dwelleth no good thing. 
And death is coming, and judgment after it, and 
this man must stand before the righteous God ; 
and what shall he say f “ Miserable man that I 
am,” he cries, as a better man than he cried before 
him, “ who shall deliver me from this dead body ? ” 
— from this perpetually besetting sin ? And has 
philosophy any answer to make here, any way of 
converting this man, of giving him a new heart 
and a new hope, of bringing him nearer to God, 
and setting him at peace 1 There is no such word 
in all the philosophies as pardon, no such fact as 
atonement, no taking away of the sins of the 
world. “ 0 Lamb of God, who taketh away the 
sins of the world, have mercy upon us ! ” That 
is the only prayer which has pardon and peace 
for an answer. There is no consolation for the 
sinner except the consolation of religion. 

People think sometimes that they can get along 
without religion. Philosophy is just as good, and 
even better. So long as there are lecture-rooms 
and music-halls and court-houses there is no great 
need of churches. Books and the reviews will 
take the place of sermons. 

But there comes an hour in every human life 


THE CONSOLATION OF RELIGION. 


253 


when there is a sudden end to all illusion and the 
soul looks straight into reality. Out from the 
depths of some great darkness of pain, of death, 
of sin, the soul cries for consolation, prays for 
light. What a man wants then is to know if there 
is a Father in heaven or not, a meeting again after 
death or not, a Saviour from sin or not. 

He doesn’t want any guess about it ; he doesn’t 
want any philosophical speculation or conjecture 
about it j he wants somebody who knows to tell 
him, so that he can know. And just that is 
Christ’s message, and the Church’s mission. That 
is the consolation of religion. 


THE PROVING OF PHILIP. 


u When Jesus then lifted up his eyes and saw 
a great company come unto him, he saith unto 
Philip, Whence shall we buy bread, that these may 
eat ? And this he said to prove him : for he him- 
self knew what he would do. Philip answered 
him, Two hundred pennyworth of bread is not 
sufficient for them, that every one of them may 
take a little.” 

There does not seem to have been anything ex- 
traordinary about the apostle Philip. He was a 
plain man like the rest of us. Indeed, all the 
apostles were plain men, about whom nothing is, 
perhaps, more notable than the fact that they were 
not notable at all. Christ passed over the more 
conspicuous men of his day and chose these twelve 
out of the people, twelve plain men. So much the 
better examples are they for us. 

There was not one uncommon man among 
them. They were not even uncommonly good, 
but had their defects, and their littlenesses, and 


THE PROVING OF PHILIP. 


255 


their shortcomings, and their sins, as we have. 
We put a title before their names, and call them 
Saint Peter, and Saint John, and Saint Philip $ 
but that is only to distinguish them from any 
other Peter, and Philip, and John, so that every- 
body may know whom we mean. We must not 
let that title deceive us into thinking that they 
were really different from us. They were plain 
people just as we are. 

And Christ chose these twelve men, who were 
no scholars, and had no money to speak of, and 
were none of them particularly distinguished citi- 
zens of the towns in which they lived — Christ 
chose these men who were no better than we are 
to be his companions and to take up and carry on 
his work. These plain men turned the world up- 
side down. So can anybody who loves Christ as 
they did, and believes the supreme truth with the 
unspeakable confidence which they had, and is 
dead in earnest, as they were. Indeed, nobody 
who lacks these qualities can do any great service 
for Christ in this world, while whoever possesses 
them cannot help helping. 

The text is the record of the Proving of Philip j 
and I want to emphasize this fact, that Philip was 
the same sort of man that we are, so that we will 
realize how closely this proving of Philip touches 
us. 


256 


THE PROVING OF PHILIP. 


The character of Philip is indicated clearly in 
the gospel history. He was the man who, being 
called by Christ, straightway went and found 
somebody else. “ Philip findeth Nathanael.” But 
when Nathanael has an objection to make to 
Philip’s claim for his Master, all that Philip can 
say is, “ Come and see.” He was not good at ar- 
guing. It was Philip, also, to whom in Holy 
Week came certain Greeks, attracted very likely 
by his Greek name, saying, “ Sir, we would see 
Jesus.” But Philip hesitates to bring them into 
the Master’s presence. He is not quite sure what 
he ought to do. He consults Andrew. And the 
two together bring the request to J esus. 

There were two kinds of people to whom Philip 
found it hard to speak. To the objector, to the in- 
quirer, he knew what to say. Of course the time 
came when Philip’s whole time was taken up with 
meeting objectors and inquirers. Whoever asked, 
“Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?” 
whoever came saying, “ Sir, we would see Jesus,” 
that was the very person whom Philip wanted to 
get by the hand. But here we find him hesitating, 
not knowing what to say, behaving just as nine 
tenths, perhaps, of the Christian people whom we 
know would behave under similar circumstances. 

It was Philip also who upon one occasion made 
a remarkable request, and upon another occasion 


THE PROVING OF PHILIP. 


257 


returned a remarkable answer. “ Lord,” be said, 
“ show us the Father, and it sufficeth us.” Could 
any wish be more extraordinary ! “ Show us the 

Father!” What did he think would happen? 
Would the roof open, and the sky part above it, 
and the invisible be made visible? Would the 
little company fall into a trance and be transported 
to the third heaven, there to behold sights inde- 
scribable ? What was Philip thinking of ? And 
yet was the desire so very far out of the common ? 
Is it impossible that you or I should have uttered 
a request so unheard of, so preposterous, so as- 
tounding ? Why, some of us are wishing Philip’s 
wish almost every day. If we could but see God 
with our eyes, and touch him with our hands, and 
hear his voice speaking to us in the English 
tongue, we could believe. How many people 
there are who have a thought like that deep in 
their hearts! “Show us the Father,” they are 
saying to religion, “ and it sufficeth us.” 

The remarkable answer which Philip made, and 
to which I have alluded, brings us to the incident 
in his life which I have chosen for our special 
study. After a season of unusually wearying 
work, Christ and the apostles had gone by boat 
across the lake of Galilee, seeking a place of rest. 
It was a desert country across the lake, and is a 
desert country still to-day. No villages clustered 


258 


THE PROVING OF PHILIP. 


along the shore, with crowds of fishing-boats put- 
ting out into the deep for a draught, as on the 
western side. It was a solitude. It was an ideal 
harbor of rest. The work of ministering to men’s 
souls and bodies had so increased upon their little 
company of helpers, that they had not time, no, 
not even to eat. They needed rest. 

But a great company of people, who felt the 
need of help just as much as Christ and the 
apostles felt the need of rest, had gone by land 
around the head of the lake, and taken sudden pos- 
session of this country. And when Christ came 
there were thousands of them. The solitude was 
crowded. Rest was not to be thought of. Then 
it was that Christ proved Philip. For it is writ- 
ten, “When Jesus then lifted up his eyes and saw 
a great company come unto him, he saith unto 
Philip, Whence shall we buy bread that these may 
eat ? And this he said to prove him, for he himself 
knew what he would do. Philip answered him, 
Two hundred pennyworth of bread is not suffi- 
cient for them, that every one of them may take a 
little.” This was an eminently practical answer. 
Philip evidently was a practical man. He was 
acquainted with the cost of things. He knew 
how much money the apostolic brotherhood had 
in their scanty treasury. He decided at once 
that this generous thought of Christ’s could not 


THE PROVING OF PHILIP. 


259 


be executed. It would take too much money. 
Philip was a man who had some idea of money. 
What he would have said to St. Theresa’s project, 
who started out, you remember, to build a hospital 
having two halfpence in her pocket, and saying, 
“Two halfpence with God can build a city” — 
what Philip would have said to that sort of finan- 
ciering, we cannot say. At any rate there is no 
mention of God here. The bread will cost so 
much money. We have not that amount of 
money ; the plan cannot be carried out. 

Now, before we go any farther, let us also do a 
sum in addition. Let us add up what we know 
about Philip. We found before that he was a 
good man who had but little to say on the subject 
of religion. And we found in his remarkable re- 
quest, and find now again in his remarkable 
answer, that he was a man who took the world 
very practically. He wanted to see what he was 
expected to believe ) and when it was a question 
of feeding hungry people, his mind turned far 
more naturally to money than it did to miracle. 

Altogether, Philip of Bethsaida was a man 
whom we all recognize as having his counterparts 
among us. The apostle who stood beside the 
shore of the lake of Galilee would not have found 
himself in a strange world with which he could 
have had no sympathy, if he could have been 


260 


THE PROVING OF PHILIP. 


transported nineteen hundred years into the fut- 
ure and more than nineteen hundred miles into 
the West, and have sat down upon the banks 
of either the Allegheny or the Monongahela 
rivers. 

This man Christ proved. Christ is forever 
proving — that is, testing — men, Christ does not 
need to prove men for his sake. That is, of 
course, evident. “He himself knew what he 
would do.” And he knew also just as surely what 
Philip would do. The proving was for Philip’s 
sake. The proving is for our sake. We are all 
ignorant about ourselves. As the years go by 
we grow wiser about ourselves ; we get to realize 
some of the unknown possibilities of good and 
bad that are in us. Amd these lessons we learn 
by God’s proving us. God teaches us what we 
are by putting us to the test. We start out, most 
of us, with the idea that we can accomplish any- 
thing. Youth sees no barriers. Step by step, this 
hard task presenting itself, this temptation meet- 
ing us, this opportunity opening for us if we are 
strong enough to take it, this and that load to 
lift, this and that battle to fight — these disclose 
us to ourselves. We learn where the limits are. 
This is God’s proving. 

And the man who is wise and in earnest and 
has had the courage to set a high ideal before 


THE PROVING OF PHILIP. 


261 


him, welcomes even the failures which follow 
these testings of God, because they show bim 
what he needs. Here he must be on his guard ; 
there he must increase his diligence. Every hon- 
est man ought to desire to know the truth about 
himself. That is the only path to any kind of 
worthy success. And along this path God guides 
us by his provings. Philip, no doubt, discovered 
more about himself by his answer to Christ’s prov- 
ing question than he had learned from all the ser- 
mons he had ever heard. 

But what was the defect in Philip’s answer ? It 
was a perfectly true answer ; it was eminently 
reasonable, matter-of-fact, and practical. It was 
the answer which any sensible man acquainted 
with the cost of bread and the value of money 
might naturally give to such a question. And 
yet Philip of Bethsaida failed. But why and 
where ? What was the defect in Philip’s answer ? 

I would say that one defect in Philip’s answer 
was that it was a hasty answer. He spoke at once, 
taking no time for thought. Perhaps if he had 
considered a little he might have answered differ- 
ently. Certainly, if he could have known, as we 
who read the story know, that Christ was saying 
that to prove him, he would have bethought him- 
self and met the test a little better. It would be 
well if we could all remember what Philip failed 


262 THE PROVING OF PHILIP. 

to remember— that Christ is all the time prov- 
ing us. 

The consciousness of being tested puts us on 
our mettle. Here is a heavy load to carry. Now 
we shall see how strong you are. Here is a hard 
provocation straight in your face. Now we shall 
see what command you have over your temper. 
Here is one coming to you, as the Greeks came to 
Philip, saying after a fashion, “ Sir, we would see 
Jesus.” Now we shall see what sort of sight of 
Jesus you have yourself. For no man can give 
to another what he has not himself. Here is an- 
other, objecting to you as Nathanael objected to 
Philip, “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth 1 
Is your religion which you offer to us true ? Can 
we not say this and that about it ? ” Now we shall 
see what kind of Christian you are. What will 
you answer ? Here is a call to duty, and on the 
other side, summoning in an opposite direction, is 
a call to pleasure or to rest. Now we shall see 
what spirit you are of. 

In a thousand ways we are being forever put to 
the proof, and if we could remember that, and 
not forget as Philip forgot, it would be better 
for us. The consciousness of the proving would 
strengthen us to stand it. 

Philip ought to have known better than to have 
made that quick decision that the whole matter 


THE PROVING OF PHILIP. 


263 


was impossible. Whatever Christ proposes is for- 
ever possible. When we look out, as we do to-day 
at the needs of men, and behold the great hungry 
multitude of the poor, and compare the world in 
which we live with that kingdom of Christ which 
he promised, and for which we pray, we have no 
right to pronounce a verdict of impossibility. All 
that is best is possible, because God is behind it. 

But Philip, even after taking time, still made a 
failure of it. It appears to have been early in the 
day that this conversation took place. By and by 
the hour came when something must be done. 
The people must be fed or not. In the meantime 
the apostles seem to have been talking the matter 
over. Philip had gone to the others and repeated 
the Master's question and his own answer, and 
the whole company had deliberately decided that 
that was the best answer that could be given. 

For it is written : “ And when the day was now 
far spent, his disciples came unto him, and said, 
This is a desert place, and now the time is far 
passed : send them away, that they may go into the 
country round about, and into the villages, and buy 
themselves bread : for they have nothing to eat. 
He answered and said unto them, Give ye them to 
eat. And they say unto him, Shall we go and 
buy two hundred pennyworth of bread, and give 
them to eat ? ” 


264 


THE PROVING OF PHILIP. 


This appears to have been the carefully con- 
sidered conclusion of the united wisdom of all the 
twelve apostles. 

There was, accordingly, another defect in 
Philip’s answer beside the Refect of haste — it was 
a self-sufficient answer. When Jesus proposed 
that generous plan, and Philip could see no way 
of carrying it out, the disciple ought to have 
turned to the Master and answered, “ Lord, thou 
knowest.” Instead of that, he endeavored to 
puzzle the matter out in his own mind. And then 
the whole twelve tried the same experiment. 
They also tried to figure out the problem j and 
when they failed to get a satisfactory answer they 
contentedly considered the matter settled. They 
could find no answer ; therefore there was none, 
except a negative, and that they fixed upon. It 
was as if a company of people should dispute be- 
side an unopened geography as to whether Ceylon 
is an island or a peninsula. It does not seem to 
have occurred to Philip and the others to ask the 
Master. 

Christ’s proving comes sometimes to-day in the 
shape of some difficulty of belief ; and there are 
not lacking good, practical, matter-of-fact, and 
otherwise sensible people who return the same 
self-sufficient answer. They take the question, 
and they turn it over and over in their minds. 


THE PROVING OF PHILIP. 


265 


Commonly the problem, like Philip's, turns upon 
the difficulty of making two seemingly irreconcil- 
able things go together. Philip could not under- 
stand how a scanty purse and a great supper 
could be set in balance. We cannot understand 
how the free will of man and the infinity of God 
can exist at the same time, nor how the presence 
of pain and sin in the world can be harmonized 
with the existence of an all-good and all-powerful 
God, nor how death can at once be an end and a 
beginning. 

What shall we do, then 1 Shall we follow Philip 
and say that, since we cannot understand, there- 
fore there is no solution ? Shall we maintain that 
the limit of our thinking is also the limit of all 
divine possibility f 

Or shall we turn away from the whole matter, 
and be content to learn of Christ ? 

Above all masters is the Master. We have no 
time to study the difficult pages of metaphysical 
theology ; nor have we the trained minds to fol- 
low the turnings and the twistings of the argu- 
ment. Every question which has ever been asked 
of the Christian religion has its answer. But 
everybody ought to know what an inevitable 
difference there is in the element of simplicity be- 
tween a question and an answer. The smallest 
child can ask a question in three words to which 


266 


THE PROVING OF PHILIP. 


the wisest philosopher cannot give an adequate 
answer in three volumes. That is why the atti- 
tude of so many people toward religion is the at- 
titude of the questioner. Because it is so per- 
fectly easy to ask questions, while it is quite often 
so particularly difficult to understand answers. 
Let us stop, then, they say, with that which we 
can comprehend. 

But that is what Philip did, and that is just 
where Philip failed. Philip ought to have trusted 
for the answer to the Master. If we are wise, if 
we really do believe that our own understanding 
is not the absolute measure of existence, and that 
the limits of our own thinking are not the final 
boundaries of truth, if we honestly desire to know 
what is beyond, the most reasonable thing that 
we can do is just to take the word of Christ. We 
do not think it necessary to understand all the in- 
tricate mathematical calculations which establish 
the fact that the earth moves. We believe that 
fact in flat contradiction to the sight of our eyes, 
because it has been pronounced upon by the scien- 
tific masters. Neither is it necessary to under- 
stand all the elaborate metaphysical reasonings 
that go to show that pain and sin can exist in a 
world which is governed by a holy and omnipotent 
God. That God loves us seems sometimes to be 
as flat a contradiction to our experience as that 


THE PROVING OF PHILIP. 


267 


the earth revolves. But the great spiritual Master 
has pronounced upon that. 

Let us not forget Christ, as Philip did. That 
was the very heart of his failure, and the secret 
and explanation of his hasty and self-sufficient 
answer. He forgot Christ. We must remember 
him. In all the difficulties that press upon us in 
our generation, some of them sociological, some 
of them theological ; some touching the problem 
of poverty, some touching the problem of belief ; 
some tempting us to a hasty answer, others tempt- 
ing us to a self-sufficient answer j let us find our 
refuge and our help in the sure word of the Lord 
Christ. 


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